Are games starting to become more core/thread heavy?
My 4690k is starting to show it's age with BF1 and other cpu intensive games...which is like almost all of them.
Yes, they are. However unless you're running a ton of shit in the background you can still easily get by with 4C. Just might take some tweaking of core affinities.
I can see why lots of people (also known as Ryzen shills) are starting to call 6C/12T a safer bet for the next few years ahead, though.