naah ur right, also, most games that make use of brown and grey, i've only realy scene that in shooters and thats because they wanna create a warlike scene so they keep the tones low, also, reality is colorful but sometimes seeing all those colors in a video game will look odd... and the game dubbed as powerful..

truth is, indie games dont fail because of the technical possibilities of an engine, they fail because of the motivation and bad workflow... such as spending 2 months to create a cool looking radar BEFORE you even start working on gameplay

based on experience, good looking games are almost mainly art, sure you need the technical power to get all that art onscreen, i hear people saying, ohh, 3dgs suck, it doesnt have realtime shadow mapping... and i can sit right now and list ALOT of multimillion dollar games that still use static lighting..

the idea is to aim for stylized rather than realism, especially as indies, i dont think i've EVER seen a succesful indie game with a realistic art style