There’s no such thing as an overnight success.
Many of us have only recently heard of the Nex Playground console thanks to its recent blockbuster Black Friday sales, but its creator, Nex Team, has been around for eight years. Launched in December 2023, the hardware comprises an AI-powered camera that tracks user movements, allowing players to interact with its family-focused collection of games.
It’s only available in the US and Canada right now. In 2023, Nex Team shipped 5,000 units, then sold 150,000 the following year after being stocked in US retailers Walmart, Target, and BestBuy.
Thanks to huge sales in 2025 – 635,000 consoles and counting – the company is closing in on 800,000 units sold to date, and it expects this figure to hit 1 million in the first half of 2026. Although right now, the console is very hard to come by due to such high demand.
But as noted earlier, it’s taken the company some time to get to where it is today. Nex Team was founded back in 2017 by a group of Apple veterans led by David Lee, who joined the iPhone maker after his first startup, online spreadsheet service EditGrid, was acquired in 2008.
The company initially focused on the AI-powered basketball training app HomeCourt, which Apple invited Nex Team to showcase on stage at the iPhone XS launch. HomeCourt later went viral during the COVID-19 pandemic, so the company created a collection of motion-based games called Active Arcade.
This was a hit in Asian markets. Millions of downloads and “hundreds of millions of play sessions” later, Lee and his colleagues noticed that if users connected their phone or tablet to a TV to play Active Arcade, the company saw retention leap up by ten times.
“We built something that people wanted, but we built for the wrong platform,” co-founder and CEO Lee explains. “That’s how Nex Playground came along.”
Creating a console – especially as some of the biggest platform holders in the world appear to be shifting focus away from hardware – feels like a leftfield move. But Lee says the decision was made after trying to find a smart TV that could power his company’s ambitions. After an unsuccessful search, Nex Team decided that a console was the way forward.
“Having a hardware component allows us to deliver the best experience,” Lee insists.
Kinect callback
The Nex Playground features a lot of older industry DNA. It’s an Android box that plays games, similar to the Ouya console from 2013, but it also centres on controller-free motion tracking, like Microsoft’s now discontinued Kinect. The former saw limited success, but the latter was a smash hit that – along with the similarly motion-controlled Nintendo Wii – expanded games to new audiences. Yet this type of motion-controlled experience has all but disappeared, save for a handful of Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 games.
“We stand on the shoulders of giants,” Lee admits. “Wii was a wonderfully successful console for Nintendo. Kinect sold a lot. The idea of playing games with your body appealed to a broad audience. Our focus is on how we differ from previous attempts. If it was there and now it’s gone, then something’s wrong; otherwise, they’d still be here.
“There are a few things we do to differentiate ourselves. With AI, we have a new technology backbone which delivers experiences. It doesn’t require hand-held sensors or headsets, unlike many motion-based VR games. We just use a camera to understand your motion. The technology has moved beyond requiring a sensor or a complex camera system, as Kinect did. It’s just a simple RGB camera with AI processing. We moved everything into software.”
One feather in Nex Team’s cap on the hardware side of things is that it is relatively low-cost. Nex Playground has an RRP of $249, although this drops to $199 during peak promotion periods. That’s not cheap, but compared to the US prices for Switch 2 ($449.99), PS5 ($549.99 with disc drive), Xbox Series S (from $399.99), or Xbox Series X (from $599.99), it’s also not expensive.
“It was really important to keep the price affordable, because we serve families,” Lee says.
“We made conscious decisions. If we are making family games and want four players, imagine you need four controllers – what would that cost? We use a single camera to view the entire living room and identify the four players. There’s a very simple remote control [to select games] which is very affordable. It’s certainly a cost-saving there.
“Another instance where we made the right choice is the hardware capabilities we chose. We are not going to compete with PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, or Switch. Our hardware capabilities are roughly at a PS3 level; you can build great immersive games already. We just made the conscious choice of picking the right hardware. We have a pretty beefy microprocessor unit (MPU), so the AI capabilities are pretty good.”
Subscription model
Another lesson that Nex Team learnt from previous hits in the console space, especially for those focused at a family audience like the Wii, is that while they sold huge amounts of hardware, the limited attach rate meant that the audience was not as profitable as it might have been. The answer was an $89-per-year subscription called Play Pass.
“A lot more users are open to subscriptions now,” Lee says. “It’s fantastic as a business model. Back in the day, Wii expanded the market, but a lot of the audience didn’t know Mario. They bought Wii Fit, Wii Sports and they didn’t buy many other Nintendo games. Those customers were not very profitable.
“The subscription-based model allows us to keep innovating for the customers we are serving. It’s a simple, honest business model 100% aligned with parents, so kids can’t come and ask for more and more games.”
He continues: “It’s sustainable and allows us not to think about any other kind of revenue model. Our production budget has increased three years in a row already, and we are using this to create better games for our customers.”
Most of the games on Nex Playground are exclusive to the platform. Half of the titles released in the last year were made via second-party deals where Nex Team partners with a developer to work closely to get the most out of the platform.
More recently, Nex has been receiving increased inbound interest from studios, including “some major games companies”. As a result, the firm is adding to its staff to help manage studios joining its platform.
“We’re expanding our developer experience team to support them and onboard them about how to leverage the platform capabilities to make great games, and work with them to […] push the boundaries together,” Lee says. “We push each other. It’s a really healthy win-win.”
Thomas Kang, Nex’s president and a veteran of Walmart’s Innovation arm, Amazon Games, and Disney, adds: “David’s very conscious about finding developers there that share our values and think about the world in a similar way, serving kids and families. We think [by finding] those people who have made games for that audience and understand the problems we’re trying to solve, the product will end up better.”
There’s a mix of games on Nex Playground. First up are new titles, such as the Snapchat-filter-on-a-TV experience Mirrorarma, the NexPets virtual pet game, or the Beat Saber-inspired Starri. Then there’s licensed IP, including Bluey, Barbie, Unicorn Academy, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Rounding out the line-up are sports games, such as Go Keeper, HomeRun Heroes: StarStrikers, and Bowling Strike.
Nex Team believes that licensed IP has been one factor in Nex Playground’s success.
“Having something like Bluey on our platform helps build credibility,” Lee explains. “Parents trust the platform more because they trust the IP to pick their partners right. It’s certainly very important for us to work with recognisable IP partners. It’s also something that kids want, they want to interact with.”
One deal that Nex Team has been able to lock down is with the National Hockey League (NHL). “That’s a partnership that’s growing,” Kang says. “All the other sports leagues have noticed, and we are in discussions with all of them to make their sports accessible to kids and families so that they understand the skill sets and the rules and start their journey to perhaps playing real sports. Parents really, really love that.”
Financial backing
Nex Team boasts a star-studded line-up of investors that includes actors Simu Liu and Will Smith, footballer Thierry Henry, and the NBA, alongside the likes of Blue Pool Capital, Samsung Ventures, and billionaire Mark Cuban. At the moment, the company isn’t looking for further investment.
“We are starting to reach a self-sustainable state,” Lee says. “It’s important that we continue as a sustainable business.”
After a whirlwind 2025, Nex Team has big plans for 2026. The company is bringing Playground to Europe next year, although it is still trying to lock down exactly which markets to enter. After that, the plan is to launch the hardware in some Asian markets.
“Our strategy to expand is very customer-focused as well,” Kang explains. “We’re going to do it at a very measured pace. When we go international, we’re going to be very mindful to those markets, making sure we have content localised and the UI localised.”
“We want to have a day where Playground could earn its place in every living room in the world”
David Lee
Nex Team expects the Playground to surpass 1 million sales during the first half of 2026. But beyond that, the company still has plenty of ambitious milestones, and its CEO isn’t in a hurry to reach them.
“Our goal will always consistently be serving […] our customers better and better,” Lee says. “We’re ambitious; we want to have a day where Playground could earn its place in every living room in the world. We want to establish the right relationship with every family we serve and ideally grow through word of mouth and reach more families. It’s step by step. I’m a very patient person, which is why we built in this way for eight years, and I don’t mind spending the rest of my life doing this.”
Kang concludes: “There are 1.8 billion living rooms with TVs: We have a long way to go. We’re just getting started.”
