Nex Playground: the household game-night gadget that revives the spirit of the Wii | Games

For a beautiful second within the noughties, video video games turned a really common pursuit. As I witnessed my controller-phobic aunt swing a Wii distant and nail a tennis serve, whereas my great-grandmother furrowed her forehead over sudoku puzzles on her Nintendo DS, it appeared my long-derided passion had lastly gone mainstream. The Nintendo Wii flew off the cabinets, inspiring a wave of opponents such because the Xbox Kinect digital camera that inspired individuals to play video games by shifting their our bodies. But the tide turned: exterior of still-niche VR gaming and the odd controller-waggler on the Switch, motion-controlled gaming has barely been seen for greater than a decade.

Now, 20 years later, a brand new console is aiming to get the entire household flailing in entrance of the TV as soon as once more: the Nex Playground. Launching within the UK later this month, the very first thing that struck me about this family-friendly machine is simply how tiny it’s. The dimension of two and a half Rubik’s Cubes taped collectively, this impressively unintrusive machine swaps cumbersome controllers for camera-controlled minigames, placing you and your loved ones immediately within the sport. Using a wide-angle lens and AI-powered monitoring tech, the Nex Playground presents over 50 video games that observe gamers’ our bodies as they leap, flail and dance about the lounge. It’s not arduous to see the attraction.

Physically leaping by means of puddles in Peppa Pig: Jump and Jiggle, dancing in time to Rick Astley on Starri and slicing up watermelons with my palms within the perennial hit Fruit Ninja, I’m impressed by how seamlessly – and precisely – the tech works. I’ve seen these video games elicit goofy grins from a parade of laughing kids at a Nex press occasion and from myself and my companion in our front room.

The Playground retails at £269 ($299) – considerably lower than every other video games console in the mean time. But it comes with simply 5 free video games. The remainder of its library is locked behind an eye-watering £90 annual subscription. In the age of free-to-play smartphone video games and a rising price of dwelling disaster, you’d think about that there’s little house available in the market for one more pricey field. But within the US, the place it launched in 2023, the Playground has bought over 1,000,000 models, even outselling Microsoft’s Xbox consoles throughout 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 may need crushed Xbox at their very own sport (this machine is rather a lot just like the Kinect motion-control cameras that Microsoft deserted within the 2010s), however Kang doesn’t see different video 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 whereas Roblox’s enormously widespread user-generated video games are worrying mother and father throughout the globe, Nex seems to be taking nice care to earn households’ belief. None of the digital camera knowledge from Nex play periods is saved – both offline or on-line – that means that households can fortunately embarrass themselves with out worrying that an omniscient tech agency is monitoring their each motion. “Safety is number one,” says Kang.

Nex CEO and co-founder David Lee tells me that the Playground began life as an AR basketball coaching app through the Covid pandemic. Users swiftly deserted his preliminary app’s basketball efficiency logging knowledge, however beloved flailing alongside to phone-camera mini video games. So, he set about designing a console that might encourage kids to remain match. “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, in addition to demoing the console at this yr’s Wimbledon, Nex is betting {that a} reference to real-world sports activities will preserve the dice from changing into one other pricey 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 video games are undeniably enjoyable, and no less than one new sport or main replace is promised each month. The query is, can Nex’s software program choices do sufficient to maintain households taking part in – 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 quickly, through parent-controlled “playdates”, and Lee hopes that this may even assist older kinfolk keep related with their households. “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 beforehand made video games for Kinect and VR are already coming to Nex, Kang says. Child-focused manufacturers akin to Hasbro, DreamWorks and Mattel have already licensed video games for it, maybe seeing it as a safer different to social media and smartphone platforms – a view that the majority mother and father are more likely to share. The most family-friendly devoted video games console at present accessible, Nintendo’s Switch 2, lately raised its value to £395.99, with new video games at £50+ every; a variety of households are in search of a extra inexpensive possibility. In an period the place the sport trade is producing a surfeit of 100-hour epics and time-sink multiplayer video games, it’s comfortingly nostalgic to play with one thing like this, recapturing the easy pleasure that the Wii ushered in a long time in the past.