After a November month that featured the annual Black Friday rush, console sales charts looked slightly different. The PlayStation 5 led the month in sales, followed by the Nintendo Switch 2. In third place, according to Circana’s Mat Piscatella, was something called the Nex Playground.
The discourse on BlueSky among the gaming press could be summed up by a simple question: What the heck is the Nex Playground? While the media wondered where this thing came from, the folks at Nex were hardly surprised by its success. After all, the team had a vision, one that it continues to share with new believers each day.
Shortly after the social media conversation died down, representatives from Nex reached out to Shacknews about a meeting at the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show. It’s one thing to ask what the Nex Playground is and where it came from, but seeing is ultimately believing. That’s why I took the team up on this offer and went to take a look at this upstart for myself.
What I saw wasn’t something that could be classified as conventional, but I did walk away with a greater understanding of how its success has come about. The main reason is that it has filled a void that some may not have realized was there.
The Nex team on-site at CES made clear that the Nex Playground is not there to compete with gaming PCs or traditional consoles. It certainly isn’t shaped like one. It’s a small box, no bigger than a WiFi router—a fraction of the size of a standard gaming console.
It doesn’t use controllers, joysticks, or similar peripherals. Instead, it mainly relies on a motion-sensing camera to read player gestures for motion-controlled gaming experiences. With this design, the Nex Playground is meant to be its own animal, one aimed at children and families.
In delivering this pitch, it was company president Tom Kang’s words that resonated with me. Kang recalled the days of his youth when he would play games with his grandmother. The two would most often play on the Nintendo Wii.
That’s when the realization hit that this is the 20th anniversary year of the Wii. Nintendo’s motion-driven console took the gaming world by storm, setting sales records that went unmatched until the Nintendo Switch came along more than a decade later. However, there was never a true successor that replaced it.
Nintendo moved on to the Wii U and the Switch. PlayStation took its Move line of controllers and applied them to virtual reality gaming. Xbox came closest to taking the motion control baton, building a next-generation Kinect camera into the Xbox One, but despite the peripheral’s potential, Microsoft quickly abandoned it and instead focused on cloud gaming and more traditional experiences.
With no true Wii successor out there, Nex saw an opportunity.
While there is nostalgia for the Wii, it’s easy to forget that the hardware and accessories felt underbaked. Setting up the Wii involved a mess of cords, a cumbersome sensor bar setup, and peripherals that didn’t register movements properly in many cases. People have fond memories of Wii Sports and Super Mario Galaxy, but the rest of the Wii generation had some glaring problems.
With that said, a lot has changed in 20 years. Technology has advanced since the days of the Wii. It’s noticeable through modern PC and console hardware, some of which utilize motion control ideas. However, there has not been a true dedicated motion-control gaming experience until the Nex Playground.
With a focus on motion gaming and that family dynamic, Nex has racked up dozens of licenses for its Nex Playground titles. There are games based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Barbie, Bluey, and many more coming down the line. The company has struck deals with some of the biggest sports leagues, offering sporting experiences that function both as competitive games and as tools for teaching fundamentals.
I saw it for myself when I tried out Homerun Heroes: Starstrikers, a game about racking up home runs in an arcade-like anime setting. I also tried out a rhythm game called Starri, which operates on motion gestures in a way similar to Beat Saber.
These are all games that can be enjoyed by adults but are mainly aimed at kids, which leads to the other key to the Nex Playground’s success—in an increasingly dangerous online world, parents are more concerned than ever about safety.
If they hand a child a tablet, they have to worry about intrusive ads and microtransactions. If a kid is left alone with something like Roblox, there’s the danger of online child predators. If a kid is introduced to online PC or console gaming, they’re exposed to a myriad of potentially dangerous ideas. A parent just wants their kid to be able to play a game.
Fully aware of this whole sector of concerned parents, Nex built its hardware with them in mind. The Nex Playground needs an initial WiFi connection for setup, but outside of that, games can be played entirely offline. There’s no online community or ecosystem in place.
The company sells an annual Play Pass subscription for its games but does not use ads in any of them. No user information is uploaded to the cloud. Even the camera that drives the device has a magnetic privacy cover.
Everything built for the Nex Playground is first-party and doesn’t get out without the company’s approval, which gives parents a valuable sense of security and peace of mind.
At CES, Nex also outlined plans for virtual playdates where friends can connect remotely. This feature can only be enabled by parents, and there is no random matchmaking involved.
Is the Nex Playground going to compete with the likes of PlayStation and Nintendo? The big boys of console gaming are where they are for a reason, but with that said, Nex isn’t trying to compete with them. Nex’s hardware wants to serve an entirely different market and plans to do so throughout 2026 with new titles set to roll out during the year, such as a game based on Nickelodeon’s The Tiny Chef Show and one with the NBA license.
The results are clear, even beyond that November sales chart. Retailers like Target, Walmart, and Best Buy have been carrying the Nex Playground since it was first released back in December 2023. Many of them have sold out multiple times.
It may not be a gaming experience on par with what PC and traditional consoles have to offer, but it would be foolish to dismiss the Nex Playground as a flash in the pan. With its target audience and its growing number of licenses, this thing is not going anywhere anytime soon.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/147383/nex-playground-2025-success-ces-2026-preview
