Remember Spintires? It's the extraordinarily Russian off-road driving sim that earned attention for both its unique subject material (and accurate rendition thereof) and the ugly conflict between creator Pavel Zagrebelnyj and UK-based publisher Oovee. Those problems appeared to be ironed out early last year, but last week Zagrebelnyj told Eurogamer that the publisher owes him a shitload of money, but that there hasn't been any real communication between the parties for the better part of a year.

Coincidentally or not, Spintires was very recently struck by a rash of seemingly out-of-nowhere bugs that have caused it to crash or malfunction in various ways. And according to this post on Reddit, it's actually Zagrebelnyj's doing: It alleges that he's inserted time bombs into the game code that are responsible for the troubles. There have been four of them so far, each eventually fixed—unofficially—by a user.

Oovees, however, denied what it called press speculation about the game being intentionally sabotaged. 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, it wrote on its forums. 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.

Despite the apparent imminence of a fix, however, Oovee has suspended sales of Spintires on Steam. It's still listed, but there's currently no option to purchase it, or even follow or add it to a wishlist. I'm not a coder, but that seems like a rather extreme step to take in the process of fixing a conventional bug—and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but the sudden appearance of crippling bugs nearly two years after a game's release seems a little hinky, too.

I've reached out to Zagrebelnyj and Oovees for clarification, and I'll update when I learn more.

Thanks, PCGamesN.

Spintires is a game about making trucks real muddy, and what a wonderful niche to snuggle up in. Andy noted that there wasn't a whole lot to it in his review, and while updates have been promised for a while now, they've been slow going. That might be because of "communication problems" between developer Pavel Zagrebelnyj and publisher Oovee, or maybe everyone involved is trying to reverse out of a muddy swamp. Probably the former, but you never know.

Anyhoo—Spintires has been updated. With five lovely new trucks. And know that official modding tools, and Steam Workshop support, are on the way soon. Those trucks are the B-66, B-131, C-4310, D-537 and K-700, and I bet you can't wait to deform terrain with their big wheels, and slather their chassis in sloppy mud.

As for Steam Workshop support, that's mostly done, albeit "with some finishing off to do".

"The remaining programming that needs to be done could not be completed until this build was stable," Oovee say. "This is where we had to make a decision, either 1) release the update as it stands, with workshop and the editors to follow over the coming weeks, or 2) break the news to you that you would not be receiving the update that is ready to be released, until workshop and the editors were ready to go.

"After much consideration, we have made the decision to release this stable iteration of the update, minus full workshop implementation and the editors due to them being incomplete at this time."

The full patch notes are located here. (Cheers, RPS.)