There's no reason they have to be. Game development is slowly but surely migrating toward fully capitalizing on high core/thread counts.

I'd be interested to know if this has changed recently - the Xbox One and PS4 are both 1.6GHz/1.75GHz 8-core machines.

When you're designing for that known console configuration you probably make use of the extra cores if you need it. And the really cpu intensive genres (strategy games mostly) don't tend to get console releases.

As 4 core/8 thread machines become basically the minimum you can assume most pc gamers will have we'll probably see devs making more use of multithreading everywhere.

> the core problem

I see what you did there.