Yeah, the video puts a LOT of data together, but I don’t think it interprets that data correctly and the conclusion is skewed. At a certain point, it says “for every brown game, there’s a Just Dance or Super Mario game to balance it off”, which, sure, it’s technically true, but nobody ever accused those games to be brown in the first place.

There certainly was a tendency in using a more prominent brown/green filter and/or excessive bloom in games during that time. The video posits that it may be due to gamers aging (something along the line of “a player playing Kingdom Hearts on PS2 who then grows up and plays Gears of War on X360 may wonder where the colours went”), but I remember a lot of series turning brown that weren’t before: compare Ace Combat 4 to Ace Combat 6, Resident Evil 3 to Resident Evil 5, and even Call of Duty 2 to Modern Warfare 2.

EDIT: Some more examples among non-shooter series to demonstrate that shooters were not the only genre affected by this: Need for Speed Underground 2 vs Need For Speed Most Wanted, Deus Ex vs Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage to Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon. The latter puts to rest the theory that gamers think that games became brown only because they switched to more mature games as they grew up.

Nobody has accused them of brown.

The way I always hear it is “games” were brown with a wink-wink nudge-nudge that certain games aren’t really games.