I do agree to most of the comments here. Designing a game around a post nuclear war theme is what most games seem to be about with the next gen. That

That's not a montage on Joystiq. A collage maybe, but montage is something else entirely.

Cruds: Oh man, I *completely* forgot about the "Blue Sky In Games Campaign"! I remember seeing a while ago now. Possibly at some subconscious level, that was the inspiration for my original post. :D

That's what I love from the Japanese games. They use bright colors instead of the depressing ones. The reason why western game is brown-ish and grey-ish is because they have dark and depressing themes. And if the game use more colors, most gamers will stay away from it. They would say, "It's a game for kid".

I hope to see more happy games in the western world.

Notice the brown and grey games were Western games.

These blue, green, white, and purple games are Eastern games.

Blizzard's WoW is an international sucess in part because of its international appeal with cartoony saturated colors.

Nintendo has always had, by far, the widest array of colors in their games. It's always been about content with them and you can see it even in the color of games. I certainly love the amount of color in their games. I think most people do tend to believe that "real" colors are washed out war time greys and browns. I really think the industry needs to take a few notes from a video camera. We don't see colors, neither does a camera... so why are so many games so bland?

I think there is a lot to be said for trend of titles that belong to a Nintendo console. I also think that the initial sampling is a narrow focus on both the original screenshot and the reader submitted one. I think there's a correlation there, but there's also the correlation that the majority of the titles pictured in the original sampling have guns in them. I think the genres seem to lock people into certain color palettes. When you get the light hearted and whimsical Nintendo-type titles, you get more vivid, saturated colors.