This notification made my pants brown 🔥

Rather than just checking brownness/saturation, I think an interesting metric to check would be hue variance within a frame. I think the real thing people mean with "brownness" is the whole screen being a single color, whether it's warm browns or cool blues, not specific warmths/browns/etc. So if you could measure a frame's average hue, and how much of the frame varies  from that hue, you could get a measure of how vibrant the frame is as a whole, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that have gone down in the "brown" era.

Vice City is a perfect representation of the 80's. We imagine neon and bright colors but everything was just kind of...brown. Furniture, wallpaper, wood panel cars, etc

0:27 - I remember back in the day FO3 and FONV was known as "the green one" and 'the brown one", respectively.

I think the scientific term is "pissfilter"

5:41 “Ingest video, excrete statistics.”

…okay Ahoy, okay.

16:35 Funny that the darkest year is also the year where TFT LCD TVs and monitors took off, which are awful at showing dark colours.

I'm surprised and now sad to discover that Deus Ex Human Revolution didn't make the cut to be in the dataset.

I see what you did there, Stuart Brown.

Orange with context

I think there's a huge oversight with this approach of analyzing for raw brownness. What I think bothers people about the brown era of video games, is not so much the absolute amount of raw brown pixels, but rather that simple color filters turn a lot of things brown, that really shouldn't be, making nothing stick out at all.

As you've shown, DOOM has a lot of browns, as it should, considering it takes place on Mars. However there are many other colors that stick out and prevent it from being boring to look at. I would never really consider it a brown game, even though in your analysis it is.

Now we just need the prequel: "When Video Games were Stuart"

13:40 The muzzle flash in Halo being so clearly represented in the graphic is funny

I was about to go to bed but sure yeah I’ll watch an essay about the color brown

17:09 for all these graphs, "error bars" would've been nice to see. Showing the brightest and least bright bounds with the average being somewhere in the middle along the graph. That would also help to understand if that average number is representative of all the sampled games, or if there was an outlier (wii fit) that significantly swung the average.

This video for me is a perfect example of a extremely good methodology applied to a bad data set.

Top 20 is a tiny tiny fraction of the releases and not representative of how a market is behaving.

I expect that the results might have been skewed a bit by picking the top 20 games from each year. I think the PS3 and 360 got the reputation not because they started the brown trend with successful bloom-blighted titles, but because there were just so many mid-tier copycats riding on the coattails of those earlier popular brown titles. I remember pretty well how it was already a meme at that point, and the colorful titles rose to the top because they were bucking the trend of what was the tired overabundant industry standard for 7/10 shooters mimicking what was cool a few years ago at that point.

Nothing exemplifies this better than Prince of Persia going from the disney-esque pastel palette of Sands of Time to the grey and sepia of Warrior Within.

There was also a shift from CRTs to early LCD screens that had bad color gamut and poor black levels & viewing angles.

0:50 actually, if I may posit a theory, it all started with Saving Private Ryan. The grey/brown/bloom trend came from the movies, its an emulation of the bleach bypass film processing technique.