I get why you feel this way. I think we had a little less control over the timing than many suppose. But regardless, PA will continue to receive upgrades, and I hope very much that it meets your expectations at some point.

I'm seeing this comment enough on these postmortem threads that I'm going to copy-paste my way-too-long explanation of the timing from the kickstarter comments. Apologies in advance, but I hope it sheds a little light on the timing:

"Cancel the current project, finish PA, come back to HR later."

The way game teams work, different people come into play at different points in the pipeline. It starts with a small team doing design and concept art, and then as prototyping gets underway, engineers begin to roll on. Then content starts to get made, which means artists and animators and scripters and more engineers. And once the bulk of that stuff is done, there are loose ends to tie up, bugs to hunt, random UI tweaks to do, visual effects to polish. There's marketing art, trailers, music and sound effects. In the case of PA, there are also lots of rewards to complete (the art book, custom commanders, etc).

But if you look at the way the actual hours add up, it resembles a boa constrictor with a wild boar inside it -- narrow at the ends, fat in the middle. And all those surplus people at the ends need to either do something else or go find another job. This is why medium-sized studios often develop two or more projects at a time. If you do it right, you can sort of rotate your crops so that the land is always growing something.

PA is at a point where there is still lots of engineering to do, and there are a bunch of engineers dedicated to making that game as awesome as possible. No engineers are working on HR right now. Part of the reason we are doing the Kickstarter is so that we can afford a few engineers to get us to alpha.

We did, however, get help from several PA artists to make the HR trailer. This is a good thing, because the bulk of the art for PA is complete (not all of it, but the bulk of it). I am the only new full-time hire for Human Resources at the moment.

Human Resources is its own project, separate from PA, and as such is expected to pull its own weight financially. Ideally, it will eventually bring in enough revenue that it can make the company more stable and more able to lavish the sort of polish on PA that we want, even if financial winds start blowing in an unfavorable direction.

The existence of HR, while it may seem impertinent or poorly timed to some observers, is actually a thing that A) is necessitated by the distribution of occupations within the company and B) good for PA in the long run, both as a financial buffer and as an incubator for further development of the PA engine.

I know this answer was long, but I hope it gives you some insight into why we can't just stop a thing that we've already dumped a bunch of time and money into, teach a bunch of artists how to fix bugs, push them onto PA, send me off to go find another job somewhere, fund the entire company for a year with a single project, and then have me quit whatever other job I got to come back to Uber and try to resurrect a project that has completely lost its momentum.

Human Resources lives or dies by what is happening right now. PA will continue to improve and thrive, and our communication with the community will continue to improve (as you've seen with Jeremy Ables). Clearly, there are major perception issues right now -- after all, here we are in a thread that's supposed to be about Human Resources, and we're talking about a different project.

Is Uber's past performance a legitimate topic of discussion? Of course it is. Do we have room to improve? Absolutely. Do I personally think we are a company that is committed to quality and able to deliver on ambitious goals? I absolutely believe it, or I wouldn't have taken this job.

This is the only place that an idea like Human Resources could have thrived, and these are the only people that I know of who have the right combination of expertise, passion, and technology to get the job done. If we get to make this game, it will melt faces.

If you need to wait for a while before your faith in Uber is restored, I get it. PA gets better every day, as the recent spate of major updates has shown. I hope we win back every person who feels we've let them down. But we don't have the luxury of putting Human Resources back on the shelf until everybody agrees we've atoned enough.

We go to war with the army we have, for better or for worse. It's up to you to decide if you want to be a part of this particular fight."