Given the pattern of video game studios unceremoniously laying off people the second a game is complete and how health care in the US is overwhelmingly tied to employment, it's extremely plausible that somebody somewhere has died from lack of collective bargaining power. If it hasn't happened, that's most likely because people just leave the video game industry before they actually need those health care benefits.
>Again, labor laws saved lives in the past, they can save and/or benefit lives today.
They can, but game dev is not a critical national industry that politicians are gonna fight for with laws to protect labor. Otherwise we could have had unionized clothes making union but what saw instead was the entire textile industry shipped oversees. Game dev will follow a similar fate.
You can unionize if you want, but unless you're guarantee to have a blockbuster IP on your hands capable of raking in billions, you won't be able to compete with game devs from lower CoL countries.
In a globalized free market with no tariffs, high CoL labor can't compete with low CoL labor making commodity goods, which a a lot of games are nowadays. Unions won't fix this, but accelerate offshoring at the expense of the local industry.
The word "might" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If unionization in Asia was so easy we would have seen it happen a long time ago, but what we saw instead was suicide nets on buildings.
Granted, I have no doubt that the work culture is much tougher than in North America. But even the Chinese government has recognized 996 and taken steps to address it.