No way. 7700k is faster in games vs the entire HEDT lineup, and HEDT prices are all jacked up due to the outrageous motherboard pricing. Going >4 cores is simply an absurd waste of money, unless you're buying off-lease, in which case its actaully great deal. And that in itself only illustrates how broken is the HEDT market.
There are several faults in your claim:
1. 7700K isn't better because it is 4 core. It's better because the way Intel has segmented the market, their HEDT have 1-2 generation older architecture. It's because of architecture and architecture alonet that their 4 cores are better. A 6700K doesn't beat 5820K and 5960X by ~5% in CPU heavy games because it is 4 core. It beats them by ~5% (as proven by DF), because Skylake has around 4-5% better IPC than Haswell.
2. 8 true cores are better than 4 cores and 8 threads. As is 8 coress and 16 threads. Of course you can argue that the cases are so few that it's stupid to even care, if you don't do CAD writing, rendering, streaming and such things. But there are those few cases, and ignoring them is not fair. Take for example Battlefield 1. Even in 1440p, there is a difference between the 6900K and the 6700K in MP:
http://techbuyersguru.com/battlefie...700k-6900k-and-r9-270x-through-titan-x?page=1
I think the same is the case with Watch Dogs 2.
Also, not recommending 8 core has happened for a good reason. When Intel prices their HEDT for the insane prices they do, not many people buy them. When few buy them, the incentive for developers to make their GPUs dependent on much more than a few cores, is small. But if AMD can release 6c/12t and 8c/16t for relatively good prices, then it changes the whole picture. Also, we already know that Ryzen has problems with increasing frequency because of yield issues. If their 4c/8t can't reach any higher clock speeds than their 8c/16, them their single core performance will stay the same. So more cores and threads in Ryzen's case will only give addtional performance in the cases where a game will make use of it. It's different with Intel, where both clock speeds and architecture differ. Of course you could argue those extra cores/threads mostly go to waste. But for people who play particuliar games, like BF1 for me, it won't. Not to mention that AMD bringing 8c/16 into the mainstream, as well as supplying consoles with 8 core chips, and DX12 becoming more pre-valent, will make more cores a good thing to have for the future. Just as BF1 is more CPU heavy than BF4, I expect the next BF in two years time to be even more CPU heavy than BF1.
That's what I'm saying to him too.
I was playing BF1 today on a 64 player map. My core utilization on my 8 logical cores (i7 4770k @ 4.3ghz) hit 90-10% very often for all 8 threads. We're already pushing the limits in multiplayer especially.
That's strange. As my link above shows, you can a bit more FPS with more cores in BF1 MP. But with my OCed 2600K, I have usage of 80%. With the 6700K at stock speeds I topped at 70% usage across al cores in CPU heavy moments -- as has been the case with 4790K and 7700K too, according to friends and videos on YouTube.