{"id":477788,"date":"2026-06-01T17:30:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T17:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/477788\/"},"modified":"2026-06-01T17:30:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T17:30:12","slug":"nex-playground-the-family-game-night-gadget-that-revives-the-spirit-of-the-wii-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/477788\/","title":{"rendered":"Nex Playground: the family game-night gadget that revives the spirit of the Wii | Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a wonderful moment in the noughties, video games became a truly universal pursuit. As I witnessed my controller-phobic aunt swing a Wii<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019 bodies as they leap, flail and dance about the living room. It\u2019s not hard to see the appeal.<\/p>\n

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\u2019m impressed by how seamlessly \u2013 and accurately \u2013 the tech works. I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

The size of two and a half Rubik\u2019s Cubes \u2026 the Nex Playground console in a travel case. Photograph: Nex<\/p>\n

The Playground retails at \u00a3269 ($299) \u2013 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 \u00a390 annual subscription. In the age of free-to-play smartphone games and a rising cost of living crisis, you\u2019d imagine that there\u2019s 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\u2019s Xbox consoles<\/a> during 2025\u2019s Black Friday week.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a nice surprise to hear that we outsold Xbox,\u201d says Nex president Thomas Kang. \u201cWhen we saw that news story we were like, \u2018Is this fake?!\u2019\u201d 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. \u201cWe\u2019re simply not competing with those,\u201d he says. \u201c[Other consoles] are in an arms race for graphical fidelity and performance. We\u2019re about active play and family entertainment \u2026 so I believe that we\u2019re a complementary device \u2026 and that we\u2019re expanding the games market, rather than cannibalising anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while Roblox\u2019s enormously popular user-generated games are worrying parents<\/a> across the globe, Nex appears to be taking great care to earn families\u2019 trust. None of the camera data from Nex play sessions is saved \u2013 either offline or online \u2013 meaning that families can happily embarrass themselves without worrying that an omniscient tech firm is tracking their every movement. \u201cSafety is number one,\u201d says Kang.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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. \u201cWhat parents want for their kids is to get them ready for the real world,\u201d says Lee. \u201cWe want to build children\u2019 interest, confidence and skill and to get kids ready to play real sports.\u201d<\/p>\n

Group hang (in the air) \u2026 Nex Playground. Photograph: Nex<\/p>\n

By partnering with the NHL and US basketball leagues, as well as demoing the console at this year\u2019s Wimbledon, Nex is betting that a connection with real-world sports will keep the cube from becoming another costly dust-magnet. \u201cFor core gamers motion control gaming could be a novelty, yes,\u201d says Lee. \u201cBut for families, it\u2019s the solution to Friday game night, [or] for staying fit.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Playground\u2019s mini games are undeniably fun, and at least one new game or major update is promised every month. The question is, can Nex\u2019s software offerings do enough to keep families playing \u2013 and paying? \u201cSo far Play Pass is approaching 90% in renewal,\u201d says Lee, \u201c[Our] customers don\u2019t have the habit of buying expensive games one by one. We don\u2019t sell ads, we don\u2019t do in-app purchases, so we will work our socks off to earn another year of our customers staying on the platform.\u201d<\/p>\n

Online multiplayer is coming to Playground soon, via parent-controlled \u201cplaydates\u201d, and Lee hopes that this will also help older relatives stay connected with their families. \u201cThe intention of that is solving the loneliness problem,\u201d says Lee. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Game publishers who\u2019ve 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 \u2013 a view that most parents are likely to share. The most family-friendly dedicated games console currently available, Nintendo\u2019s Switch 2, recently raised its price to \u00a3395.99, with new games at \u00a350+ 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\u2019s comfortingly nostalgic to play with something like this, recapturing the simple joy that the Wii ushered in decades ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a wonderful moment in the noughties, video games became a truly universal pursuit. As I witnessed my…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,80],"class_list":["post-477788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}