These are not eye gougingly bright colors. They are basically brown/grey. 

The hell is that last screenshot? Its not Ninja Gaiden or AC2

Most of them are, atleast from my experience.
That's the reason why I like Bioshock Infinite so much.
It's a really colorful game.

There's a place and time for everything - people who think that everything needs to be chirpy colorful are just...funny, to be polite.

Here are two versions of George Grie's "The Sand Castle", they both are telling, IMO, quite different story, and I find both to be valid:

You should look into:

ICARUS PROUDBOTTOM & THE CURSE OF THE CHOCOLATE FOUNTAIN

Your mind will be blown!

IMO that second picture makes the post 70% less funny, but it's still very funny.

None is saying a game is only grey or only brown. You exactly know what they mean.


@ OP
Alot of e.g shooters are located in dirty, dusty, deserts or in ruins and post apocalyptic ghost towns or whatever. Its full of brown and grey and if there is color then its extremely desaturated.
(if you try to create atmosphere but all of it is the same then you failed because atmosphere lives from change and from contrast. Like shadows dont work if they dont get highlighted by light.
This is also why this "individual fate girl" exists in Shindlers List)


And colors have alot of emotional impact on people. For alot of people everything looking the same/similar is tiring and starts to get boring. Why did so many people start to hate WW2 games? because there were way to many of them. Same with grey/brown games. (with minimal use of color). But that does obviously not apply to black and brown only.  it applies to everything that is overused. Black silhouttes games like these

are already on alot of peoples "no thanks" list

And if every game would start to go "COLOR EXTREME" like this it also would start to get boring/annoying.



Back to the "brown/grey" games.
Having 1 extremely dominant color is not the problem. Most games using the same 2 colors is. Also not having a contrast (no poping color when everything is muddy/desaturated) Its like reading a block of text without punctuation or paragraphs or listening to a 15minute monologue in a movie. its just tiring for alot of people,

In my opinion way to many games look like this:

(the asia level looks great tho. So just this scene not the entire game is representative here.)






_

More games need to look like this:


(In this scree white is obviously dominat but "blueish shadows" and popping colors help alot!)




(Not realistic I know)

They do have their fair share of everything looking the same areas but always add variation. Spec ops is a great example of being dark when needed.

Realism combined with desaturated colors/grey/brown makes alot of people think "I cant see this s***anymore"


and I  almost never heard people complain about racing games thb. (maybe if its the generic  mid-day nurburgring track that existed in way to man racing games imo)



and before people jump to conclusions (because they seem to like doing it) This has nothing to do with me making fun of anybodies taste or whatever.  And if you dont know "whats going on" with/in 3 of the 4 "color screenshots" I posted then dont even bother replying because it shows you have no idea what you are talking about.

So long story short. Being grey/brown in doses is great but give people time to "recover" from that by providing some variation. (Battlefield 3 does a good job here)

This. Zekkyou generally makes too much sense.

How is CoD bland? It has a bunch of colors.

it happens, Wright! You can't always win.. :/