I don't think they meant it as a SAO copy.
Original title of this series is "Sword Dance" (just a quite fancy way of qualifying a sword fight, not weird for an online game to have a title like this if you just look at the existing list of rl chinese games and novels we see around). English title on there seems to be more "Online sword dance".
Chinese title for SAO is very different 刀剑神域, which is something like "the divine domain of blades and swords".
The only thing they share is the VR and the "stuck in game without choice", but everything else is pretty different. Not saying this story isn't also a bit generic, but it's not SAO.