C++ is not feared by the gaming community. Having worked on an open-world game engine selling millions, I can say the people in the business are extremely skilled and knowledgable.
The fact that shared_ptr isn't used extensively is partly because there is a real cost to it, but more importantly because ownership isn't very clear. Ownership and resource management is one of the most important and hardest things to get right. Partly because resources are still scarce on console, but also since most difficult bugs tend to be related to unclear resource management (e.g. who and what controls the lifetime of an object). IMHO shared_ptr doesn't help with that the least.
There is an added cost to exception handling, which makes it just not worthwhile. In the final game, no exceptions should be thrown anyway - it's better to just crash than to throw an exception. Plus, it's really hard to ensure exception safety in C++ anyway.
But there are many other parts of C++ that are used extensively in the gaming business. Inside EA, EASTL is an amazing remake of STL that is very adapted for high performance and scarce resources.
