Gamer-motivated CS people with those skills will go far.
The people you mention made a common mistake. They went to a university to study X, and not because they were interested in X but because they wanted to do Y and believed that X would be useful in it. That's a mistake, because academic education does not work like that. Mastering the curriculum does not make you an expert in the field. The curriculum is only a scaffold. You are always expected to learn more, both because you should find the topic interesting and because learning more makes sense.
I've seen many extraordinarily talented people who got into this field originally because of the dream.
I basically bombed out of the math sequence at linear algebra, at least I gleaned enough to do basic rotations and other matrix math on polygons so I could understand the techniques used by the apis and big boys.
They also need to do performance tuning, and in consoles with uniform hardware, get to optimize code to the hardware to ridiculous degrees. The war stories of games dev in the Atari 2600 up to the playstation 1 are amazing.
It makes sense somewhat - the skills and talents for, say, racing cars has almost nothing to do with the skills or talent to design and construct an engine.