By Nelson Schneider - 02/01/26 at 01:23 PM CT
It seems that we may have jumped the gun in singing the praises of the Nintendo Switch 2’s glorious launch last year, as the latest and blandest from the Big-N only really sold “well” immediately after its launch, with Gamers quickly cooling on Nintendo’s milquetoast Launch Window games (and so, so many Ports/Remasters), leading to a massive drop-off during the 2025 Holiday season. Of course, neither Sony nor Microsoft did any better than Nintendo – and in fact, they actually did worse.
However, there’s one game console that kicked major booty while everyone else was failing... and it’s basically a toy that no serious Gamers or gaming hobbyist has probably heard of: The Nex Playground, a motion-controlled Casual game platform retailing for $250, with 5 pack-in games.
The real question, though, should be, “How in the world did the Nex Playground succeed when it did everything wrong?” Surely we have long enough memories to recall that a significant contributor to Xbox’s crash-and-burn was the disastrous XBONE reveal, in which Microsoft stressed that the console literally couldn’t work without the Kinect motion-tracking camera. Isn’t it strange that the Nex Playground is literally just an Android box glued to a Kinect, then? And surely we know that Nintendo’s flood of Casual games and reliance on the “WiiSports” pack-in with the Wii lead to the company’s decline until the release of the original Switch, which forced the Japanese game titan to reorganize and merge its console and handheld divisions. Isn’t it strange that the Nex Playground revolves entirely around the same type of experience that “WiiSports” provided? Surely we also can remember just the last two years, in which Microsoft has struggled to find a market for and derive profits from their Gamepass subscription service. Isn’t it stranger still, then, that, apart from the pack-in games, the only way to expand the Nex Playground’s library is via an annual $90 subscription?
What in the world is going on here? How could a Casual game console that relies entirely on the same motion-tracking gameplay that scuttled the Xbox Kinect, that relies on the same subscription model as Gamepass that tanked the Xbox Division’s revenue on their biggest game of 2025, and that appeals directly to the same Casual non-gaming audience as the Nintendo Wii and WiiU sell 650K units in one year, and outperform the established console market players during the holiday season?
Perhaps the unexpected success of the Nex Playground is just part of the ongoing collapse and implosion of both “AAA” Industrial Gaming and the console market. Or, perhaps more realistically, the Nex Playground was a fluke, and a flash-in-the-pan that just so happened to coincide with a Holiday Shopping environment in which people are feeling poorer than ever. We have no official sales numbers for the Nex Play Pass, so we don’t know how many people who bought the toy itself have been willing to shell-out cash for the expanded library of... honestly Android/iPhone-tier swill. Perhaps the Nex Playground’s cheap $250 price tag combined with its target audience of young children, inside of a challenging economy caused people to treat the Nex Playground, not as an aspirational device that they or their kids actually wanted to play, but rather as the “We have McDonalds at home” meme equivalent of a console.
