I have a similar, after making a 9.75 Dungeon/RPG, all my new game sucked. I reloaded, because I thought I had did something wrong, but all games I tried got 6s at best. I think, one review mentioned “bad technique”, but I generally have almost everything, you can have.
I’m only like 6 years away from the end and I have a lot of successful games (a lot 9s or better), but for some reason I’m not able to develop a good game anymore and I don’t know why.
Guys, consider ‘real life’.
Sometimes games score really well in the media and they do terrible in sales, and vice versa. If you’re feeling frustrated with unpredictable sales outcomes, imagine what game developers feel like.
You’re asking for pointers to figure out ‘the system’ - a luxury real life game developers don’t have. Keep at it. Most successful entrepreneurs go through a lot of failures before hitting success 
One was to balance the game would be to reduce the amount of money staff needs at the end of the month.
I am on year 24 and have made 40 million without ever using a publisher. I don’t think they are necessary.
My biggest suggestion would be to rework the formula that generates total sales. I understand that, in order to prevent on rockstar of a title from netting a billion USD, you have to nerf the sales a bit, but I’m launching AAA and netting 50M in product moved. It seems very unrealistic that titles this big wouldn’t get global results (in the hundreds of millions of copies sold).
This would mean some pretty impressive mathematical gymnastics, but I think the realism would sell the universe of the game even more.
To balance it out, adjusting the cost of advertising for AAA titles, or advancing the cost due to cross platform generation.
I know it’s been well over a month since this post went up (and a new topic was made for it), but I thought I’d put in my two cents. I support the idea of tweaking the balance; right now, the quality drop after a hit seems a bit too punishing. In the real world, expectations may go up after a hit, but people are often favorably predisposed to the company and sometimes there’s only so much you can do with the technology reasonably available. I’ve always thought that the progress of time and technology should factor more into reviews than how many good games were made in the past. Then again, these are just suggestions. I still enjoy the game!
Also, does anyone know how to stop pirates from stealing all of my profits? Just kidding! I bought my copy fair and square, and am looking forward to seeing it on Steam once it’s tweaked and polished.
Sometimes you have to do some creative adjusting when it comes to moving out of the garage. I believe the problem you are having is the fact you don’t have enough fans. So your game is not doing as well. To correct this issue, do what all true game developers do, cheat.
Download Cheat Engine or any program that can search memory. I actually do this step on the first game, when it goes from 0 fans to 13 fans or so. Do a search in memory for 0 first, then when it changes, search for 13. You might have to do it again when it bounces to 27 or so. After about 3 changes, it should narrow it down to the exact memory location you are looking for.
Here it is displayed for research, but fans are more important than research, so do fans first, then research: