This is the British box art for the upcoming city builder / RTS Settlers 7:

This is the American box art:

Same game, two very different tones. The British box is light and happy and full of daylight. The American box is dark and grim and full of fear. The British box says “This is a fun game”, the American box says “Games are serious business.”

What does it say about Ubisoft’s opinion of strategy gamers that they think that dark is what sells in America? And doesn’t this art go explicitly against the idea that Settlers 7 is going after a different audience than traditional RTSes? Because a black box with a grizzled soldier guy (weird since the hero of the campaign is a heroine) targets the exact same audience that other strategy games are going after. In fact, the same audience that every PC game without the word “Sims” in the title is going after.

(Thanks to Nabeel Burney of Slowdown for pointing me to it. He found the links to the To The Game images on the twitter feed of Alex May, developer of Eufloria.)