Yeah but games the majority of people want to play don't need special hardware. I mean how much horsepower does Solitaire, Tetris, Minecraft or Angry Birds take?
Don't disregard the amount of computation Minecraft does. It is not in the same league as the other games you mention. Even more so if you place blocks that require frequent updates (such as redstone logic).
I'm sure Minecraft does a lot of impressive things on a technical level.
However, I remember running it just fine on an old XP machine with a 32bit, single-core pentium III and 2GB of RAM. In addition, this game has been available on smartphones quite some (phone model) generations ago.
The smartphone version isn't the same as the desktop version - it was literally rewritten from scratch, and as such is much more performant, although it lost support for mods of the original version as a result.
Yeah, because gamers have the deepest pockets in consumer-grade hardware, that isn't a tiny niche segment. Business users aren't tricking out desktops to the tune of thousands of dollars to push the envelope of performance.
Well, aside from the cult of Mac... They spend the same amount of money as gamers, but for bog-standard commodity hardware in a pretty case.
I agree with the question though maybe not the assumption that goes with it.
I imagine professional workstations for industries such as software development, visual arts, industrial design, film production, music production etc. are large users of high end CPUs.
My gut says that all of these fields are much smaller worlds than you assume, especially when compared to the 7-11 million concurrent Steam users and countless more PC gamers in countries like China and Korea.
"I imagine professional workstations for industries such as software development, visual arts, industrial design, film production, music production etc. are large users of high end CPUs.
None of them uses overclocked CPUs (like Intel's K-series) that's fairly standard for high-end gaming
