In PC Gaming single core performance is important unfortunately.
Hopefully developers further take advantage of at least 16 threaded CPUs as a default standard. This should be pushed industry wide ASAP.
Intel holds a very slight lead in gaming performance over Ryzen. ZEN3 will eliminate that lead based on what information is available about it.
Games will not be able to scale well with many threads. The workloads of a game is basically divided into three categories; 1) rendering, 2) core game simulation 3) optional stuff (like networking, sound effects etc.). Rendering(1) only scales until the GPU is no longer bottlenecked. While some games can leverage multiple queues to do multi-pass rendering etc., the scaling potential here is fairly limited anyway, and the thread(s) feeding the GPU is usually the only ones which matters for FPS anyway. Also, the future long-term trend in games is that the GPU does more and more of the heavy lifting. Game simulation(2)(game loop) is usually a fixed workload, since the game needs to work the same across machines, and is usually scaled towards the minimum requirements of a game. Games are also incredible latency sensitive, which makes it very hard to divide timing critical tasks into tiny chunks across many cores. We might see some more multi-core scaling in gaming, but games will not use 16 threads even 10 years from no (except for a couple of edge cases, of course).
Applications in general do slowly scale better with multiple threads, but even here there are theoretical limits to what is achievable. Even with the best efforts, most synchronized workloads (like most client applications are) will see a scaling drop-off around 8 threads, and not scale well beyond 16 threads. Asynchronous workloads scale nearly perfectly though, but very few of those are relevant for end-users. Anything beyond 8 cores is more relevant for users running multiple applications simultaneously rather than single applications.
