‎"The retail sales of videogames in the US have declined in the past two years...."
"Games are setting new sales records, yet industry wide sales have plummeted."

I don't get it. New sales records, yet sales are dropping?

"Games exist to make money. Not for any other reason - not for creative purposes, or for the sake of making something new."

This can be said about any consumer product. Unfortunately, no matter how cool something is, if people don't buy it, the product will tank. I think creativity is rewarded to a certain extent, but everyone's got a cool idea, right?

As for the possible sub-par quality of new games, I can't say. I think you have to be a hardcore gamer to accurately judge whether a game has included challenging gameplay, new features or intriguing storylines. I would think many sequel games (Call of Duty, Bioshock, etc) play very much like their originator, but I don't really think that's a bad thing. Familiarity with controls and actions should facilitate purchases. When I realized I couldn't learn multi-button control schemes (and across platforms), I gave up console gaming.