Indie hit Spintires appears to be back on track after developer Pavel Zagrebelnyj and publisher Oovee sorted out their differences from last year, with problems blamed on "communication issues" that saw - among other things - messages sent between dev and publisher using a fake Skype account, and with Zagrebelnyj at one point convinced that he had been frozen out of the development of his own game.
"We openly admit that communications between Oovee and our customers have been weak over the last few months. Our customer base grew far beyond what we initially expected and we needed to cater for that quickly - the development plans became sketchy and before we knew it we had a runaway train. Please accept our apologies," said a statement made by the publisher.
"In the past there has been speculation regarding the relationship between Oovee and our programming god, Pavel. Yes - no relationship goes without its problems, however, we have settled the communication issues that we have had in the past."
In the same post on Oovee's forum, more details were discussed, including thoughts regarding DLC for the off-road racer:
There has been controversy within the community over our decisions with DLC, however we can happily confirm that a new DLC is heading your way this summer. Expect us to spring some more details on you regarding this over the coming months.
And as for a potential sequel, this is what the publisher had to say:
How can we possibly talk about the next iteration of Spintires when we still haven't finished improving the current version of Spintires? Well to be fair, software is never finished and we understand that. But with the huge success of the Spintires release, it's kind of a no-brainer but to continue the franchise and create an even better game with a larger team and a larger budget.
So with great pleasure we can confirm that planning has commenced for the next iteration of Spintires, whatever form it may come in. It is suggested not to ask too many questions about it because we simply cannot answer them just yet.