This should tell you there is a flaw somewhere.

Maybe the perception of brownness comes from things that aren't supposed to be brown; nobody looks at a basketball court or a sun-bathed road and says "This is abnormally brown". If Gears of War, CoD, FO3, Doom 3, GTA4 aren't coming up, you haven't calculated the thing they're talking about.

Not really. Mid-2000s was the exact time when mainstream gamemakers discovered shaders, but the power of those was only enough for a rough filter thrown over everything. So, armed with the solution, developers looked for the problem that it would solve, and decided that making games look grittier is just what's needed. ‘Need for Speed: Most Wanted’ from 2005 was a major offender in this.

That was very much a repetition of the Great Browning of mid-late nineties, when textures got detailed enough that devs likewise sought to apply them as much as they could, and did that by using textures of dirty brown ground, scratched brown stone, and nicely looking brown wood. Particularly in FPS games like Quake 1—3. Can't really showcase the textures with smooth-looking walls in bright colors, and few people were gonna make dozens of assorted textures for a variety of environments.

Interesting video, but I disagree that it proves that the "brown thing is a myth". I was around back then and it was definitely a thing that was also being heavily criticized.

The thing is that with the methodology that guy employs, I guess it wouldn't really be visible. The "brown game" aesthetic, while definitely a trend, wasn't the only trend during that time. At the same time, you had the explosion of colorful Nintendo casual games on platforms like the Wii and DS. Many of those sold extremely well, so they'd be overrepresented when you only take the top 20 bestselling games of each year. Same with sports games, those never really change much, but they'll show up heavily on every top 20. But with games that wanted to seem more "mature" and especially genres like first-person shooters (like in the meme), the trend was very real.

I think it's interesting to attempt to analyze and chart this, but his analysis isn't the end. One notable failure, in my opinion, is he attempts to calculate the average browness (and other variables), not the percentage of games that have a lot of brown. Average browness largely measures outliers.

Also, not excluding sports games, and things like that, is ignoring a large part of what people discuss with this. The argument isn't that all games were more brown then. It's largely that shooters, or action games in general at most, were more brown than other years.

Basically, saying it's a myth (despite it being a well-recognized thing at the time) referencing one source isn't correct. At most you can make the statement that some data implies it's a myth. I highly suspect the methodology here is not accurate to what the actual understanding is. It's a good effort, but it is not the end of the discussion.

you had a flattening of video game color for sure, wether it was the brown mill sims like COD, the green of fallout 3, or the yellow of deus ex human revolution. and few very influential games ‘color’ our memories.

at the same time you have your oblivion surreal super contrast color explosion. compared to nows muted rerelease. before, the mono coloring was a stylistic choice, and now it’s a tapping into the game engines realism settings