Typical Bay Area game devs with under 5-10yrs of experience are making something like $80k-$140k/yr and working 80 hr weeks, without a cushy stock package, taking a pay cut if they agree to rev share, and getting normal healthcare benefits, sometimes retirement.

That's not nothing, or even bad per se, but those same people have much better options. Even for normal people at a normal startup and not fishing around till they get lucky they ought to be in the $140k-$200k range, working 30-60hr weeks.

Separately, it's slightly bad. Working at Trader Joe's and McDonald's double full time gets you better pay and benefits than the $80k/yr game dev, especially if they still have any student loans. After taxes, getting lucky with a cheap apartment, and utilities, they're banking $22k/yr. Their chunk of healthcare, either car expenses if they drive in or extra rent if the live close to work, food, ..., makes the situation a lot worse. It's mostly fine starting out if you're single, pretty good even, but adding in any other dependents puts them under water, and they definitely don't have the financial headroom to weather any kind of financial emergency.

"same people have much better options"

No, no they don't: people seem to forget that at a game company, the minority of people are engineers. The extremes are designers: there is pretty much no equivalent to, say, level design outside of the games industry. Other design disciplines - it takes a bit of mental gymnastics to find a way their game work could translate into something out of that industry.

Art? There's a bit of fleeing of hollywood VFX going on - it's no more attractive for 3D artists that the gaming industry. Other forms of art in games as well pretty much only have an overlap with hollywood as well (audio too).

Game industry QA? Doesn't really exist in that form anywhere else, but it's a minimum wage job either way.

All this to say that many of the jobs in the games industry don't translate to much outside of it.

You're right, but most of the complaints about low paying salaries focus mostly on the programmers. Management is paid about as well as in/out the industry (many from out the industry. Which explains modern game dysfunction). Art is underrespected but that's across all the industry except maybe animation (the article even links to a NYT article titled "Trump Proposes Eliminating the Arts and Humanities Endowments". Even the government doesn't respect it, and it's not a new trend). Other places like Sound, VA, and design do transfer but are traditionally gig economies instead of a full time employment.

Are there any unique characteristics to game development workforce related to healthcare costs or retirement savings? If not, it's not particularly meaningful to bemoan games as expensive compared to any other labor intensive industry.

The only unique characteristic is how relatively new games are. And as a result any tech leads the US had was quickly closed by EU/Asian markets. So there's more allure than usual to try and tap into that cheaper but still talented labor compared to suffereing in America (even though everyone wants to tap into the American consumers and the USD. But alas).

Probably not, healthcare costs are eating America alive. As a country America is willing to try anything except the one thing that has worked everywhere else.

I'm all for universal healthcare and think the system we have in place is idiotic, but other developed countries are struggling with healthcare as well (they'll say their system is the worst, just not as bad as America's).

But universal healthcare is one way we can really fix our labor market: by making it a public benefit with mean-based contributions, labor markets would relax a lot: more jobs become viable even if they otherwise don't economically meet the bar to provide healthcare, because they don't need to. No one stresses about losing their healthcare when they lose a job, or want to switch, or have to switch. Similar support for retirement savings would help also.