'Squid Game,' 2 ways? How Netflix's reality competition show compares with MrBeast's YouTube version.

It's official. Netflix has given the green light to a second season of Squid Game: The Challenge.

Ahead of Season 1's Wednesday finale, in which the winner of the reality competition series $4.56M prize was revealed, the streaming service announced plans to bring the show back for another season.

"There was no red light in our decision to greenlight Season 2 of Squid Game: The Challenge, the most ambitious unscripted show we’ve premiered at Netflix," Brandon Riegg, Netflix vice president of nonfiction series said in a statement to Variety. "We're so excited to continue the franchise of Squid Game with our team in Korea, and producers at Studio Lambert and The Garden for this epic competition series."

Since its Nov. 22 debut on Netflix, Squid Game: The Challenge has captivated audiences and stirred controversy with its high-stakes gameplay that some say put contestants at risk. The show is a spin-off of the original Squid Game, a South Korean scripted series that broke viewership records on the streaming platform when it was released in 2021.

This isn't the first riff of off the original source material, however. Not long after scripted series's runaway success, YouTuber Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson quickly assembled and launched his own reality show version of Squid Game on YouTube the same year.

He hired a visual effects company to build the sets and make the games come to life in a warehouse. His Squid Game take, $456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!, became his most-watched video ever upon its Nov. 2021 release, with more than 541M views and counting.

Now that Squid Game: The Challenge has crowned a winner, how does it compare with MrBeast's version?Here's how the two competitions stack up.

Squid Game, 2 ways

It started with a TikTok. MrBeast told his followers in 2021 that if his post gets 10 million likes, he would re-create Squid Game "in real life." They delivered, and so his process began. The YouTuber spent $2M to build sets and produce the show, and he spent $1.5M in cash prizes, he said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

He shared the resulting competition, $456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!, on YouTube on Nov. 24, 2021. The video was 25 minutes and 41 seconds, consisted of 456 players competing for the jackpot. The winner would take $456,000. All competitors earned $2,000 for playing, 22 players netted $4,000 for choosing to leave early, and the runner-up got $10,000.

Netflix did things differently. It announced plans for the 10-episode reality competition in June 2022, opening a casting call for players on its website.

The game was filmed in London's Cardington Studios, a former Royal Air Force base. Squid Game: The Challenge also brought on 456 players, but with much bigger prize: $4.56M for the winner. No other competitors would earn money while playing the game. The producers recreated the dorms and would remove beds as the contestants would get eliminated, giving them a sign of just how many people were left in the competition whenever they reentered their living quarters.

The original Squid Game relied heavily on CGI to create its sets and game designs. Netflix and MrBeast both built out sets for contestants to compete in the games, while also utilizing some CGI to fully create the illusion of more intense eliminations.

"It's a spectacular achievement in crafting — in real life — some of the sets and games from Squid Game, which, as a scripted show, used CGI to create some visuals, and did not have to create fair, working versions of the games," Andy Dehnart, TV critic and editor of the website Reality Blurred, told Yahoo Entertainment.

What competitors had to say about their experiences

Six contestants spoke on anonymity to The Wrap to discuss shooting the Netflix's competition show, calling it "heartbreaking," "excruciating" and "absolutely shitty."

The contestants who spoke to The Wrap claimed that none of them made it past the "Red Light, Green Light" game, and that almost all of them "alleged that their eliminations were unfair. Some of them even claimed the initial challenge was rigged, as some say they were eliminated after crossing the finish line before time ran out."

Rolling Stone and Variety reported on difficult conditions during filming process as well.

"It was just the cruelest, meanest thing I've ever been through," one former contestant told Rolling Stone. "We were a human horse race, and they were treating us like horses out in the cold racing and [the race] was fixed."

Netflix and its co-producing studios, the Garden and Studio Lambert, denied claims of a fixed game, telling Rolling Stone that "any suggestion that the competition is rigged or claims of serious harm to players are simply untrue."

Jessica "Figgy" Figueroa was prominently featured on Squid Game: The Challenge as Player 033; she told Yahoo Entertainment she felt "like everything was fair" when she competed on the show.

“With the way that they've designed Squid Game: The Challenge, there are a lot of twists in this series, instead of how the original series was [written]," she said. "There's a lot of chance involved and a lot of luck, but also it falls back on each player."

As for MrBeast's version, players who spoke out following the YouTube competition had mostly positive things to say, with one challenger calling it "an amazing experience."

What critics had to say about the challenges

There has been criticism about both versions of competitions, as some say Netflix and MrBeast missed the point of the original show by creating these plays on the dystopian sci-fi show.

"MrBeast's video misses the point not only overall but also in its tiny details. For example, the contestants chosen in Squid Game come from financially difficult backgrounds, whereas MrBeast chose his contestants randomly from his followers, removing the stakes that make the original characters so compelling," ScreenRant wrote at the time. "There was no lesson to MrBeast’s video; it was instead just a contest."

TechCrunch shared a similar sentiment on MrBeast's YouTube folly, writing, that it "lacked the emotional resonance and suspense that made the [2021] Netflix show so compelling — since there is nothing at risk for the participants, the stakes feel about as high as a daytime rerun of Wheel of Fortune."

Netflix's also faced blowback for its unscripted Squid Game: The Challenge.

"If you were able to forget for a moment that Challenge is based on a horror series that denounces the very idea of capitalism, you still wouldn't find anything remotely worthy. It is choked by its own ridiculous format: 456 contestants? Most viewers can’t keep all 22 on ABC’s The Golden Bachelor straight ... Producers and editors struggle to create coherent narratives, find heroes and villains or even anyone who hangs around long enough and does anything interesting enough to be worthy of screen time," USA Today argued.

What did the original Squid Game creator have to say about Netflix's reproduction? Hwang Dong-hyuk sounded off about fears that a reality show on the source material could be problematic after the unscripted series was announced.

"I know that there are some concerns of taking that message and creating it into a reality show with a cash prize,” Hwang said at the 2022 Emmys, per Variety. "However, I feel like when you take things too seriously, that’s really not the best way to go for the entertainment industry. It doesn't really set a great precedent."

Squid Game: The Challenge is streaming on Netflix.