I’m in the game industry and we use a lot of different fonts. I have never seen a game company buy one of these obtuse licensed fonts. I started my career in the design industry and I quickly steered my peers away from these licenses. The licenses just aren’t designed for modern applications. Often, as well, is that these fonts haven’t been tested on rendering systems other than browser/OS level and need a lot of work and adjustment to work.
Where do you see game companies sourcing their fonts? It's not my field, but I had the (possibly incorrect) impression from some past discussions that a lot of fonts used in games are created for individual titles much like other artwork. I doubt many game studios are trying to license fonts like Gotham for unlimited use.
In my experience Game companies buy giant font packs (unlimited license) and then use them as needed. You’re right that a lot of fonts are custom made or heavily modified in game, but not all fonts are. A lot of game text is shared between games so they use common fonts.
Also the requirement for wide characters like Russian or Chinese make a lot of “toy” fonts unusable.
