Pre-orders are already live for the UK and Ireland launch of the Nex Playground, which is set to ship towards the end of June. The console, which is aimed at families and employs motion-tracking technology – much like Microsoft’s long-gone Kinect – proved to be a surprise hit in the United States, pushing the PlayStation 5 into third place for gaming hardware unit sales in November 2025.
The system cost $249 in the States, but in March this year the company announced the price would be increasing to $299 as a result of a rise in the cost of components, driven by the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure. The UK launch price is £269.99, while it costs €319 in Ireland.
“Ideally we wanted to make it cheaper,” Nex CEO and co-founder David Lee tells GamesIndusty.biz, adding that it’s been a “weird year” as a result of the AI-driven pressures on gaming hardware manufacturers.
But Nex president Thomas Kang feels confident that there won’t be any further price jumps in the near future. “We feel good about the price we’re at right now,” he says. “We’ll be able to sustain it.”
“We feel good for this year,” he adds. “We have secured our components for this year.”
Kang won’t share the sales targets for Nex Playground’s UK and Ireland launch, but he is confident of the demand for the console. “Right now we’re on allocation for all markets, meaning we have more demand than supply. We ran out the last two Christmases on December 4. We left the entire December demand on the table.”
“What we will do is we’re going to make sure that the UK has sufficient supply throughout the year, because it’s a new market that we’re entering. We see a lot of potential here.”
Does Nex expect the console to sell out again this coming December? “We hope not!” laughs Kang. But Lee warns that supplies are not unlimited, even though the company aims to produce a bigger number of consoles in 2026. “The demand is still faster than our supply can catch up right now,” says Lee, who notes that some people were reselling Nex Playgrounds at twice their retail price after supplies ran dry.
Subscription only
The Nex Playground comes with five free games – Fruit Ninja, Starri, Whac-a-Mole, Go Keeper, and Party Fowl – but new games can only be added via a subscription rather than being bought individually. The subscription costs $49/£45 for three months, or $89/£90 for 12 months – and most buyers sign up.
“The subscription attach rate currently is over 80%,” says Kang. “And then the renewal rate for our biggest cohorts is above 70%.”
One advantage of the system is that it allows Nex to see exactly what types of games its users play and which ones they should invest in. “Subscription just gives us so much creative freedom,” says Lee.
He points to the Nex Labs section of the service, where prototype games are tested with the audience, giving the example of an experimental meditation game. “The subscription service… leaves us with freedom to explore something that has not been done before,” he says.
In terms of how developers are paid, Lee says there’s a variety of models. Licensed IP is usually done under a work-for-hire arrangement, he says, “but when external studios bring in their own original IP, we always have rev share. We’ll pay for the creation of the game and [give] rev share, too.”
He explains that Nex wanted to create a “healthy ecosystem” where studios not only receive payment upfront, but also receive payments that are tied to the success of the game over time. “It’s an engagement model,” adds Kang, “based upon how much time people spend at a game versus the aggregate. And so as our subscription base grows, it’s a very attractive platform for developers, because we don’t have thousands of games on our platform. We’ll grow to 150, 200 maximum over time.”
“We don’t want to see ourselves as a discovery mess”
Thomas Kang
So, is Nex putting an upper limit on the number of games on the system?
“That’s more like our intention to curate a great library of games,” clarifies Lee. “We theoretically don’t have a limit. Can we build 500 games? Yes, we can. But does 500 games make a better product? No, it does not.”
Kang says that when it comes to the Nex Playground library, the focus is on quality over quantity. “We don’t want shovelware on the platform,” he says, where users have to sift through a thousand or more low-quality games.
“We don’t want to see ourselves as a discovery mess. We want to be very, very convenient for families to find stuff they want to find very quickly and enjoy that.”
Keeping the number of games relatively low is also beneficial to developers, he adds. “We are paying developers past their minimum guarantees already, in our third year of life,” says Kang. “I’ve been in the game industry for 20 years – getting paid past minimum guarantees is unusual.”
In addition, part of Nex’s strategy involves going back and improving the games that are already popular. “So this year we’re actually spending a lot more time updating old games or the current games on the platform, because people like them,” says Lee. “Because it’s just constantly making the product a better product.”
Online multiplayer
Nex is adding online multiplayer functionality to the Playground this year. But naturally, given the console’s strong focus on children and families, the company is taking it cautiously.
“We are so, so careful about this,” says Lee. “Designing that right is absolutely important to us.”
Firstly, the online multiplayer is optional, he explains. “We don’t want to force it upon our users.” And secondly, establishing a connection with another device requires parental consent, which involves each parent inputting a code.
Lee also emphasises that the video feed of whoever is playing is not sent between the devices. “Your movement or your action gets sent, but not your video, not your voice, not text.”
Kang says that online play is something that players have been asking for. “David talks to our community all the time. He’s our community manager. He manages 50,000 people on Facebook – I’m not joking. And the vast majority want to connect to play. The vast majority. But they want it safe.
“They want grandparents to connect with their grandkids. They want siblings to connect with each other, cousins to connect with each other. So this is about friends and family, no strangers.”
“We want to create meaningful connected play experiences,” says Lee. “But at the same time, keeping it safe and secure, and not exposing the kids to any kind of potential danger. So we take responsibility for that, and we will roll it out very carefully. We always give the parent the control, because we are building for them – we are not optimizing for getting the kids to do something, we are not in that business.”
Beyond the UK
Nex Playground has taken a while to reach the UK and Ireland, having launched in the United States back in December 2023. Kang says the company is being considered about the rollout.
“We want to be very respectful to each market. Every market we go to, we’re going to localize to local IP, local play patterns, stuff like that. I think Europe will be our focus for the next year or so, and then we’ll be going to other markets eventually. We expect to be global. We’re going to be in every important gaming market, and outside of it as well.”
“I think the European market is the second one that we are interested in tackling,” adds Lee, “because we feel that we can solve similar problems for the market. We are very interested to go to Asia, but that will be our next step.”
“We want to make sure that we do one market at a time, and also make it available,” he concludes, “so that people who want a product can actually get it.”
