What characters would likely come back.

[Christopher]

So, is Beastie 100% not going to return? He is one of the most important characters that was ever in the game, right alongside Tux and Gnu. Also, what about Elephpant and Gooey, are they going to come back? And as for the new characters, are at least Katie, Libbie, and Freedo going to be added? It'll be best to have over 20 characters in the game.

Personally, I wasn't happy when Beastie got removed. But we also don't want to have Debian distribute what appears to be some STK version, while actually having changed what's inside.

Evolution will have more karts than 1.5, but I won't confirm any character that hasn't been already announced, and I don't know myself the final list.

I think your point about the licenses is valid, but with all due respect having more than 20 characters is necessary, because almost all modern racing games have that.

The only reason having 20 characters or more in standard is necessary is because it is pretty silly to have the game allow racing with 20 karts, while not having enough standard karts to do it without resorting to duplicate karts.

There are other reasons why having more characters is nice. But it's all in "nice-to-have" territory, not "necessary". Many other games doing something doesn't make it necessary. Many games have DRM. Many games have lootboxes.

Having some huge number of vehicles is a way to pump up marketing numbers for big game studios that can easily absorb the overhead, but for a project like SuperTuxKart each extra official kart means additional work that could have instead gone to improve other visual elements (including potentially improving the quality of other karts), it means an expectation to keep updating that kart if new features are added (animations, various graphical features, custom sounds and voicelines...)

Diminishing returns are also a thing. The work for each extra kart is the same, but the benefits get smaller: existing options are likely to already be satisfying, the selection screen gets crowded, and player have to learn the kart's characteristics.

Extra high-quality karts are desirable, but we are not chasing some marketing number. It's better to focus on quality and slowly expand the number later than try to reach a big number and have most of the karts neglected by players.

Are there licensing issues with Elephpant, the mascot of PHP, and the Android Bot, and would you ever consider adding Katie, Libbie, and Kate?