That's not true, at least for AAA games. Most modern AAA games make good use of all available processors. This is especially important for games that ship on th

That's not true, at least for AAA games. Most modern AAA games make good use of all available processors. This is especially important for games that ship on the Xbox 360 and PS3 because these devices only start delivering impressive results when you go parallel. It's difficult to come up with a good multicore game engine design and even more difficult to do it on the first try. What I've observed over the years is that these AAA games are steadily becoming more and more parallelizable as they are iterated on. An architectural pattern that seems to be working well these days is a job/task-based one where the program is expressed as a graph with the tasks (well defined units of work) are connected via a network of dependencies. This model works well because it doesn't force you into requiring certain hardware configurations, it scales well from single core phones up to 32+ core workstations. Now, whether or not your content can scale as well is another question :)