For a wonderful moment in the noughties, video games became a truly universal pursuit. As I witnessed my controller-phobic aunt swing a Wii remote and nail a tennis serve, while my great-grandmother furrowed her brow over sudoku puzzles on her Nintendo DS, it seemed my long-derided hobby had finally gone mainstream. The Nintendo Wii flew off the shelves, inspiring a wave of competitors such as the Xbox Kinect camera that encouraged people to play games by moving their bodies. But the tide turned: outside of still-niche VR gaming and the odd controller-waggler on the Switch, motion-controlled gaming has barely been seen for more than a decade.
Now, 20 years later, a new console is aiming to get the whole family flailing in front of the TV once again: the Nex Playground. Launching in the UK later this month, the first thing that struck me about this family-friendly device is just how tiny it is. The size of two and a half Rubik’s Cubes taped together, this impressively unintrusive device swaps cumbersome controllers for camera-controlled minigames, putting you and your family directly in the game. Using a wide-angle lens and AI-powered tracking tech, the Nex Playground offers over 50 games that track players’ bodies as they leap, flail and dance about the living room. It’s not hard to see the appeal.
Physically leaping through puddles in Peppa Pig: Jump and Jiggle, dancing in time to Rick Astley on Starri and slicing up watermelons with my hands in the perennial hit Fruit Ninja, I’m impressed by how seamlessly – and accurately – the tech works. I’ve seen these games elicit goofy grins from a parade of giggling children at a Nex press event and from myself and my partner in our living room.
The Playground retails at £269 ($299) – significantly less than any other games console at the moment. But it comes with just five free games. The rest of its library is locked behind an eye-watering £90 annual subscription. In the age of free-to-play smartphone games and a rising cost of living crisis, you’d imagine that there’s little space in the market for yet another costly box. But in the US, where it launched in 2023, the Playground has sold over a million units, even outselling Microsoft’s Xbox consoles during 2025’s Black Friday week.
“It was a nice surprise to hear that we outsold Xbox,” says Nex president Thomas Kang. “When we saw that news story we were like, ‘Is this fake?!’” Nex might have beaten Xbox at their own game (this device is a lot like the Kinect motion-control cameras that Microsoft abandoned in the 2010s), but Kang does not see other games consoles as direct rivals. “We’re simply not competing with those,” he says. “[Other consoles] are in an arms race for graphical fidelity and performance. We’re about active play and family entertainment … so I believe that we’re a complementary device … and that we’re expanding the games market, rather than cannibalising anything.”
And while Roblox’s enormously popular user-generated games are worrying parents across the globe, Nex appears to be taking great care to earn families’ trust. None of the camera data from Nex play sessions is saved – either offline or online – meaning that families can happily embarrass themselves without worrying that an omniscient tech firm is tracking their every movement. “Safety is number one,” says Kang.
Nex CEO and co-founder David Lee tells me that the Playground started life as an AR basketball training app during the Covid pandemic. Users swiftly abandoned his initial app’s basketball performance logging data, but loved flailing along to phone-camera mini games. So, he set about designing a console that would encourage children to stay fit. “What parents want for their kids is to get them ready for the real world,” says Lee. “We want to build children’ interest, confidence and skill and to get kids ready to play real sports.”
By partnering with the NHL and US basketball leagues, as well as demoing the console at this year’s Wimbledon, Nex is betting that a connection with real-world sports will keep the cube from becoming another costly dust-magnet. “For core gamers motion control gaming could be a novelty, yes,” says Lee. “But for families, it’s the solution to Friday game night, [or] for staying fit.”
The Playground’s mini games are undeniably fun, and at least one new game or major update is promised every month. The question is, can Nex’s software offerings do enough to keep families playing – and paying? “So far Play Pass is approaching 90% in renewal,” says Lee, “[Our] customers don’t have the habit of buying expensive games one by one. We don’t sell ads, we don’t do in-app purchases, so we will work our socks off to earn another year of our customers staying on the platform.”
Online multiplayer is coming to Playground soon, via parent-controlled “playdates”, and Lee hopes that this will also help older relatives stay connected with their families. “The intention of that is solving the loneliness problem,” says Lee. “We want to create a space where grandparents play with their grandkids, even if they cannot be physically together. My mom lives in Hong Kong, and myself and my daughters live in the Bay Area. FaceTime can only take you so far.”
Game publishers who’ve previously made games for Kinect and VR are already coming to Nex, Kang says. Child-focused brands such as Hasbro, DreamWorks and Mattel have already licensed games for it, perhaps seeing it as a safer alternative to social media and smartphone platforms – a view that most parents are likely to share. The most family-friendly dedicated games console currently available, Nintendo’s Switch 2, recently raised its price to £395.99, with new games at £50+ each; a lot of families are looking for a more affordable option. In an era where the game industry is producing a surfeit of 100-hour epics and time-sink multiplayer games, it’s comfortingly nostalgic to play with something like this, recapturing the simple joy that the Wii ushered in decades ago.
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Nex Playground launches in the UK on 22 June.
