Agreed. But in the Hunger Games universe, the games were supposedly a successful thing for many years prior to Katniss coming along. My issue was that there's no way that thing could have been successful up to that point. It would have been an utter failure on the very first year, and the revolution would have occurred immediately, long before Katniss' time.

As you said, the Bread and Circuses thing only applies when you're ritually executing criminals and war prisoners, not when you're executing the innocent children of the oppressed peoples.