And before that there was The Running Man and The Long Walk both by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman) that were about deadly game shows / contests in futuristic dystopias.
There's "inspired by" media with similar concepts, then there's straight up copying it and not even bothering to change the content. Star Wars is inspired by westerns but adds its own flavor. Squid Game straight up copies Kaiji to the point that the only real difference is the language.
Kaiji is amount my favorite anime (I haven’t read the manga). It is very obvious the Squid Game creator borrowed heavily from Kaiji, and ripped off the overarching theme, but aside from the glass platform game was there really a lot else taken from Kaiji? Were there any other games or story arcs in the manga that were stolen?
(I haven’t seen season two of Squid Game yet btw).
I believe the point is that Star Wars is inspired by enough things and puts enough creativity into the combination that it isn't an obvious rip-off of any of its inspirations.
Everything has inspirations. Truly new ideas are rare and often the first author to a truly new idea doesn't necessarily do a great job with it, and certainly can't explore it fully in any one work. But there's definitely a category of "direct ripoffs with little more than the proper nouns filed off". I'm not even targeting that at the current discussion; it has been observed by many people that rather a large number of "Hallmark movies" are literally just the same story, beat for beat, with the details of the participants in the love triangle slightly altered and recast. There's entire genres that are arguably just ripoffs of the genre template, over and over.
I always heard that George Lucas was inspired by The Hidden Fortress by Akira Kurosawa. If you watch it (and it's a great film) the parallels are quite obvious.
Eh this is more of a stretch, George was more inspired by The Hero With a Thousand Faces than he was Dune. Star Wars is telling a completely different story with a different central idea than Dune. The only obvious similarity is a desert planet.
