I do appreciate the insight, but IMO it doesn't really account for just how many of the top selling titles were that gritty brown/yellow. Sure there were plenty of colorful games....that weren't...
Yeah I'm not a data scientist at all but I felt like I could see some flaws in his statistical sampling process. Maybe that's bad science but I felt like he could have done a few things to ensure...
Yeah I'm not a data scientist at all but I felt like I could see some flaws in his statistical sampling process.
Maybe that's bad science but I felt like he could have done a few things to ensure accuracy. For one I wish he ran a full frame analysis on at least a few games where he took a sample of 1 frame every 10 seconds or so and then compared it to the data from his highly truncated sample set and see if the results were relatively similar. That would give me a lot more confidence in his "only a very small amount of frames per game are being analyzed" methodology. Otherwise I think it opens the methodology up to small sample size anomalies, such as the menu in Oblivion being brown resulting in the higher than average brown score for an otherwise vibrant game.
I've grown to respect AHOY's thoroughness over the years so I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this and imagine that he put a lot more thought into it than I have, so there's probably just something I'm missing when it comes to this.
There is something to be said for playtimes. If a super colorful game gets 5 hours but CoD gets 2,000, the browness will definitely impact more on the collective concious of the day.
There is something to be said for playtimes. If a super colorful game gets 5 hours but CoD gets 2,000, the browness will definitely impact more on the collective concious of the day.
p.s. Timestamps, if you just want to skip ahead to the Results (11m42s) and Conclusion (18m10s).
Everybody knows that video games went through a phase of desaturated brown, yellow filters, and bloom. It is an unassailable fact, for which the evidence is everywhere. The unrelentingly bleak palettes of games like Gears of War, Call of Duty, and Assassin's Creed. The urine-tinged highlights of Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Fallout 3. The trend was so pervasive it even infected The Legend of Zelda. The beautifully bright colours of Wind Waker were lost, replaced with the drab hues of Twilight Princess. The most erudite video essayist adjusts their glasses, and starts to read from a script: 'It all started with Resident Evil 4'.
But wait - hold on a minute. Did it? Did video games really go brown for a while, or are we just cherry picking examples to fit the conclusion?
The discourse surrounding video games can be quite dogmatic. Certain things are accepted as truth without any real basis. Now, I'm not trying to tell you that there were no brown video games during Gen 7. I'm just pointing out that brown was not a novel invention. There were brown games before. Quake was famously brown. All the World War 2 games of the early 2000s had drab colours. So my question is, was there any measurable change? Is there some kind of objective measure we could chart, so that we might witness the trend with cold, hard data? For instance, could we do a colour analysis over a significant portion of video games history?
Now I know what you're thinking. We're talking decades - thousands of games, each with hours if not hundreds of hours of gameplay. How would you analyse all that? It's impossible! So anyway, here's how I did it.
Ah, you beat me to it to post this. I really enjoyed this video, and it's nice to get some actual numbers backing up the claims of gen 7 brownness. If people haven't explored Ahoy's other content,...
Ah, you beat me to it to post this. I really enjoyed this video, and it's nice to get some actual numbers backing up the claims of gen 7 brownness.
If people haven't explored Ahoy's other content, they have a lot of other similar videos on all sorts of gaming related stuff which is well worth some of your time. Their "Iconic Arms" series is particularly good, especially the Chainsaw episode. Also their investigation into the legendary game, Polybius is the definitive text on the topic as far as I'm concerned.
I had a fun garbage theory at the time of this meme that video games were brown because then they could use monochrome textures to save memory space because those consoles had so little memory...
I had a fun garbage theory at the time of this meme that video games were brown because then they could use monochrome textures to save memory space because those consoles had so little memory available to them. The biggest reason why PS4 games looked better than PS3 games (other than improved anti-aliasing, which was very jarring in a lot of PS3 games) was that there were no longer visible texture artifacts everywhere.
I do appreciate the insight, but IMO it doesn't really account for just how many of the top selling titles were that gritty brown/yellow. Sure there were plenty of colorful games....that weren't selling 20M+ units.
In 2009 or so, everyone and their mother played CoD Modern Warfare 2, the poster child for that era. 27 million sold.
By contrast, Borderlands sold 2 million. Super Mario Galaxy 2 sold less than 8.
I think what happened more than anything is that the desert-themed shooter fell somewhat out of favor as the Iraq war continued to drag on.
Yeah I'm not a data scientist at all but I felt like I could see some flaws in his statistical sampling process.
Maybe that's bad science but I felt like he could have done a few things to ensure accuracy. For one I wish he ran a full frame analysis on at least a few games where he took a sample of 1 frame every 10 seconds or so and then compared it to the data from his highly truncated sample set and see if the results were relatively similar. That would give me a lot more confidence in his "only a very small amount of frames per game are being analyzed" methodology. Otherwise I think it opens the methodology up to small sample size anomalies, such as the menu in Oblivion being brown resulting in the higher than average brown score for an otherwise vibrant game.
I've grown to respect AHOY's thoroughness over the years so I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this and imagine that he put a lot more thought into it than I have, so there's probably just something I'm missing when it comes to this.
There is something to be said for playtimes. If a super colorful game gets 5 hours but CoD gets 2,000, the browness will definitely impact more on the collective concious of the day.
Kinect Adventures! being the top copies-sold game over Grand Theft Auto 5 is great trivia night ammunition. What a curveball.
p.s. Timestamps, if you just want to skip ahead to the Results (11m42s) and Conclusion (18m10s).
Ah, you beat me to it to post this. I really enjoyed this video, and it's nice to get some actual numbers backing up the claims of gen 7 brownness.
If people haven't explored Ahoy's other content, they have a lot of other similar videos on all sorts of gaming related stuff which is well worth some of your time. Their "Iconic Arms" series is particularly good, especially the Chainsaw episode. Also their investigation into the legendary game, Polybius is the definitive text on the topic as far as I'm concerned.
FYI, you accidentally linked to this brownness video instead of the actual Polybius video.
I had a fun garbage theory at the time of this meme that video games were brown because then they could use monochrome textures to save memory space because those consoles had so little memory available to them. The biggest reason why PS4 games looked better than PS3 games (other than improved anti-aliasing, which was very jarring in a lot of PS3 games) was that there were no longer visible texture artifacts everywhere.