Earlier this month, we mentioned how Xbox had lost Black Friday in terms of hardware sales to a console we'd never heard of (in the US), and that console was known as the Nex Playground.
This is a family-focused console that retails for just $249 USD, and works a lot like the Xbox Kinect. There's no controller — it's all motion-based — and the games are based around famous IP like Bluey, Sesame Street and Kung Fun Panda.
Speaking to The Game Business this week, Nex CEO David Lee admitted that the console has no chance of competing with "high-end graphics" like on the Xbox Series X and PS5, suggesting it's more comparable to the Xbox 360 / PS3 era in terms of power. Nevertheless, it still allows for "immersive games" while also keeping costs low.
“We are not going to compete with high-end graphics. Our graphic capabilities on Nex Playground is roughly similar to PS3. But we can create great games on PS3. The graphics are not bad. It’s 10x the Wii. It’s not that it hasn’t improved [over Wii], it’s definitely improved. And it allow us to create immersive games."
Affordability is a big selling point of the Nex Playground, and it seems like this isn't a situation where they can afford to make big losses on the console. Lee mentions that Nex is a small company that has to remain sustainable, and therefore they've made "a set of choices" to ensure the price tag is an attractive one.
Not having a traditional controller is one of these choices, while another is adopting an Xbox Game Pass-like subscription model called "Play Pass" that the company says is crucial in terms of achieving sustainability.
“Nintendo expanded the audience with Wii. When you expand the audience, and they want different things, and they only buy Wii Fit, Wii Sports and not many others… that’s a bit of a problem. Who am I to speak for Nintendo? Nintendo obviously has a really great strategy on how they want to serve the audience. But, from our perspective, we want to build something sustainable. And if we build a platform and people come in and buy a couple of games and that’s it…the whole system is not sustainable. It’s just not. It’s very important that we set ourselves up to serve our customer continuously with new innovations, that is how the whole system can sustain."
“Games that don’t need to have a business model on their own… the creative freedom just explodes. We can try that and see whether the customers like it. It’s more fun. It’s equally fun for customers, because they don’t know what we have in store for them. This year we created 20 new experiences and many more updates. We upgraded the OS as well. This is all enabled by the subscription model."
It sounds like the Nex Playground is going from strength-to-strength right now, then, with apparently 600,000 units having been sold already this year — four times more than last year.
Don't be surprised if we hear about it a lot more in 2026 as well, as the plan is to expand beyond just the US and Canada. In fact, Lee's long-term mission is to bring the Nex Playground to "every living room".