We’ve been following this story all day and we’ve been waiting for a further update from Spintire‘s developer Pavel Zagrebelnyy. It now appears the game has been pulled from sale.
To give you some quick background on this, the developer of popular off-road terrain driving game Spintires had been accused of sabotaging his own game with”time bombs” that would activate and cause the game to crash.
The accusations started following a recent update to the game which appeared to trigger one of these bombs leaving players out in the cold. The reason it was thought to be deliberate is because developer Pavel Zagrebelnyy apparently has a troubled relationship with his publisher Oovee.
According to Pavel, publisher Oovee owe him money although Oovee deny this claim. This all came to light following a comment made to Eurogamer last week by Pavel which read “They owe me a s***load of money according to our contract.”
This evening Pavel sent a statement to Gamasutra in which he denies these bombs are sabotage and explained they are a bug caused by a time-related piracy check. He also added:
“In regards to Eurogamer article – I didn’t actually know I was being interviewed when I gave my responses to the author of the article (I know I’m being interviewed now hehe) – but yes – it’s true, they violated our contract from day 1 basically and still owe me lots of money. What makes it worse is that they don’t ever comment on that if I ask if they plan to resolve the issue anyhow. I was compensated but not in full.”
The issue has come to a head tonight with Spintires being removed from sale on Steam. The page is still available but it is not currently available to buy.
This evening Oovee announced that they have a fix in the works and commented on the press articles that have appeared covering this issue throughout the day. This will explain why it is not available to buy right now.
We are aware of recent press speculation relating to sabotage of the Spintires game by the lead developer Pavel. We wish to express our displeasure at this speculation and totally refute these and other recent allegations. It is a shame that some press are reporting this without talking to us, and even saying in some articles they are yet to talk to us.
The situation on the bug is that we became aware of a major bug last week that caused the game to stop for some users. We have been working on this with Pavel since it came up
Progress on the next planned update has been suspended while we sort the bug issue.
We believe we have now identified the problem and are now testing at this very moment a hot fix provided by Pavel, who is also ready to help further if needed. We’re fully focused now on making the game work properly again, so please allow us to get this sorted first and we’ll then be able to explain what has caused this and then carry on with future updates we have planned.
Nobody actually knows if Pavel is due any money from publisher Oovee as he claims, but it would seems odd that a developer would sabotage an ongoing revenue stream to simply make a point.
