Nex Playground Review: The Little Cube That Actually Outsold Xbox

The Nex Playground — a colorful, 3-inch cube console that uses an ultra-wide camera to track your body movements instead of a traditional controller — quietly outsold Microsoft's Xbox consoles over the 2025 holiday season. IGN originally passed on reviewing it at its 2023 launch, and this belated write-up is the publication's attempt to reckon with that call.

Setup is genuinely painless: four items in the box (the console, an HDMI cable, a USB-C power cable with a magnetic camera-shutter puck, and a small remote), numbered packaging so you know what to connect first, and no waiting for game installs or updates. First-time configuration needs your Wi-Fi password and a Nex Playground account, and you'll have to dismiss a prompt for the company's $89 Play Pass subscription before you get to the home screen. The settings menu is bare-bones — no HDR, no resolution toggles — but you can hide games, set a sleep timer to protect your OLED, and use HDMI-CEC to have it switch your TV on and off. On the hardware side, the console packs 16GB of RAM, which is technically more than the Nintendo Switch 2's 12GB, though the reviewer is quick to note that stat means nothing about relative performance — it's just a fun number.

The Nex Playground's pitch is straightforward: every game on the system forces you to physically move, using the front-facing camera to read your body. The reviewer draws an explicit line back to the Wii, noting that the appeal is the same — it gets non-gamers and kids off the couch in a way that traditional consoles don't. The Wii comparison isn't just nostalgic; it's structural. Like Nintendo's motion-control era, Nex Playground is aimed at parents who want screen time to at least involve some physical activity, and the low barrier to entry (no controllers to lose, no patches to wait for) makes that pitch land.

The review is framed as a mea culpa of sorts from the gaming press, which largely ignored the device at launch. Whether the Playground holds up as an actual games platform beyond its novelty is what the full review sets out to answer — but the holiday sales numbers have already made the case that the audience the gaming media overlooked was very real.