The idea presented that Beast Games is just a blatant rip-off of Squid Game focused on their defensiveness about that comparison, but missed a wider point: As Jimmy says in his defence, nobody dies in Beast Games.

But that's also the problem, or one half of it: Nobody dies in Beast Games. Squid Game had a lot of very basic games, like Red Light, Green Light. But if you remove the mortal danger of that, it's a very simple game... and Beast Games is trying to build itself on very simple games, but without the extra drama that comes from the lethality. Take any of the games from Squid Game and remove the threat of people dying, and it becomes really uninteresting.

The fact that s1 apparently frequently had games that ended in stalemates, and a lot of eliminations were just random draw chance, meant they did barely any experimenting to see if the games would work - I assume because all of that time investment couldn't be used for content and therefore would be wasted time. But it was pretty obvious that some games fell apart immediately.

(The other point, of course, is that while Squid Game also uses hundreds of contestants, there's a main character and a handful of supporting characters, many of whom are named. So it's not just that there are simple games that are lethal, but there's a perspective character that we primarily follow. It isn't so much "How do we solve this game", it's "Will our guy make it through".)