Here’s what’s next for the Nex Playground

The era of getting off your couch to play a video game is alive and well, thanks to the Nex Playground. Designed as a family-first gaming device, Nex Playground exclusively uses motion controls and the company develops all its games either in-house or with vetted studios. That means parents control the content their children can access on it, and there’s a large library of games with younger audiences in mind.

The Playground launched in December 2023 and has been slowly gaining steam ever since. In November, it made headlines for outselling Xbox hardware to become the third-highest-selling console of the month. That led to more than 650,000 units sold in 2025. Now, thanks to the company’s presentation at CES 2026, we know what’s to come for the Playground in the months ahead.

Taking the Playground online

Nex announced that the Playground would be available in the U.K. in the spring, the console’s first market outside North America. The company also plans some major upgrades for the console. Nex is currently working on its own version of online gameplay, set to launch on the Playground this year.

The Playdate feature allows a console to directly connect to another one, pending parental approval on both sides of the connection. Unlike most online gaming, the consoles will not connect to a central hub to play together. Instead, the devices communicate with each other directly, keeping any personal information from being stored on the cloud.

I played the connected version of Tennis Smash: Racketville at CES, which is a single-player title on the console. Though the consoles were near each other, they were also connected via truly awful wireless internet that was available at the convention center. And yet, the gameplay showed practically no delay whatsoever. That said, the entire affair was a little exhausting after a long convention day, because Tennis Smash: Racketville requires a considerable amount of physical activity, which I learned when watching two Nex representatives play the game, darting around their individual spaces. If you want to win, standing still isn’t an option.

While Tennis Smash: Racketville was the only playable game with Playdate enabled during the session, it’s easy to see how this tech could be implemented with most of Nex’s library of games, especially the sports titles.

Sports might be Playground’s future

If there’s one thing missing from the Playground, it’s more games for adults. Sure, it has games like Racketville and NHL Puck Rush to satisfy older players, but there has to be more, right? The answer, per Nex, is absolutely. Without revealing an official title, the company announced a partnership with the NBA and also teased that more games from “global professional sports leagues” are on the way in 2026. While you are definitely not going to get the incredible detail and complex gameplay of NBA 2K26 on the Nex, a casual, shooting-hoops game led by LeBron James or Steph Curry would be, if you could excuse my terrible pun, a layup.

In keeping with those ambitious plans, the Nex team had a line of accessories at the demo for use with its various sports games, including branded tennis rackets, baseball bats, basketballs, and hockey sticks. All of them were made from soft materials, save for the hockey stick. While they aren’t necessary for your movements to be tracked, they certainly made it easier for me to play.

With a focus on adding in more sports content in 2026, an expansion to the United Kingdom, and connected play all on the horizon, it looks to be exciting times ahead for Nex. As Matt Patches noted in Polygon’s review of the Playground, “There really is nothing like this.” Now, with an expanding global footprint, partnerships with professional sports leagues, and connected gaming in the works, a lot more people are about to find that out.