When we celebrated the first anniversary of Face-Plant Adventures back in September this year, we revealed that with only 210 copies sold, our game was not a commercial success at all. At least, we had surpassed the payout threshold of 150$, so once we would renew our membership we'd be able to enter our account/tax details and get paid a little something.
The first time I checked the sales numbers again in the App Hub after that was in November, and I was shocked to see that all of a sudden our total number of purchases had dropped to 109, being basically reduced by 50% out of nowhere, which also applied to the number of total trials. At that time, a lot of things seemed to be broken in the App Hub. The peer review system didn't seem to work according to some members, some developers couldn't see sales numbers at all for September continuing and I also found a thread with regards to wrong payment data, but no issue seemed to be similar to the one we experienced. We figured that our issue was a side effect of all the problems going on at that time and thought we'd just have to wait a little and the problem would get sorted along the way.
When I logged in today to see if our sales numbers had recovered and would display a number closer to the original purchases again, I had to see that things had gotten even worse: I can't view data for September 2012 anymore, the month we released our game. The sales numbers display a meager 82 purchases in total, losing another ~30 sales, the total trials are reduced respectively, with the conversion rate just short of 10% being the only constant in this mess. I have pinged an e-mail to support but usually, you never get a response from them, so we're worried now to be stuck with these wrong sales numbers.
Before support for the Xbox 360 ceases, we would like to try and publish another game on the XBLIG channel. But if this issue cannot be resolved, we can hardly have any confidence in the service anymore and can't really justify to renew our memberships.
We would really appreciate if anyone from the XNA / XBLIG community knowing about or facing the same or similar issues got in touch with us to see if anything can be done to rectify the situation.
