Those PC game figures were for in store retail and didn't include online purchasing which is a pretty significant chunk these days.
Define "pretty significant". For PC games not to be selling worse than in 2000, they would have to have revenue in excess of 1 billion USD, or put another way, online distribution (Steam/RealArcade/Total Gaming) has to better than all the stores you can buy video games in. Yeah Casual games are reputedly on the rise big time, so mayve it's the sector to be in...
So you agree that real games is on the decline? More powerful? Needs to have a higher skill level and uses more magic up.
How is that balancing? For starters ir puts artificial constraints on what you can do (which is counter intuitive to what you originally described), and secondly it gives people who have been playing a long time, an incredible combat advantage, further askewing the balance of the game. Particularly since these people who have played longer are probably getting pretty bored by now, and are amongst those most likely to start griefing. There are ways to balance things.
Sure. You just haven't mentioned any yet. I bet you thought the "Flashlight switching" sub-game of DOOM3 was a clever game device?