You can’t see it, but I’m rolling my eyes. End-of-year sales numbers and projections for the games industry have started emerging, and you know what that means: Another round of breathless headlines about the demise of music games — no really, this time we mean it.

“The Music Game Revolution is Over,” says geek.com. “Rhythm Video Games Quickly Entering Twilight of Their One-Hit Wonder Career,” reads the headline at Gizmodo. And CrunchGear takes a simpler approach: “Music Video Games, They Are Dying.”

Right.

Here’s the thing: Each of these articles is referencing the same Reuters piece about the decline in revenue for the music-game sector in 2009 as compared to 2008. In it, ubiquitous games analyst Michael Pachter talks about how he expects the music-game market to have generated about $700 million in revenue this year, as compared to about $1.4 billion last year. So: about 50 percent less money coming in this year than last year — certainly a newsworthy number, and one that music-game makers certainly ought to pay attention to.

But let me drop a quote on you from the original article, and see if you can spot the difference between the truth and what’s being reported:

[T]his doesn’t mean the music-game category is a quickly fading fad with no future. No one expected the same level of record-breaking sales achieved in 2008, and Pachter expects the category will level off at about $500 million-$600 million per year, which he calls a “nice, healthy” genre on par with the “Call of Duty” action-game franchise. That doesn’t take into account the revenue earned from in-game music sales, which “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero” have yet to report.

So: The article says music-game revenue has dropped from 2008 — the year that Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour both came out, with their suite of new and/or improved instruments — but that revenue is likely to level off at Call of Duty numbers. And that those figures don’t include revenue from DLC. And this means music games are “dying.”

Naturally.

[Read, thanks to Lee for the HOT TIP]