‘We are standing on a giant’s shoulder’: Nex Playground CEO says it wants to fix the ‘problem’ Nintendo had with Wii
David Lee believes a subscription model favours the surprise Black Friday hit console
The CEO of Nex has explained how it has taken inspiration from Nintendo Wii, but also wants to improve on some of the business decisions Nintendo made with it.
The company grabbed headlines last month when its $250 Nex Playground console got a 14% share of console sales during Black Friday week in the US, pushing Xbox Series X/S down to fourth place.
The Android-powered console features a motion-tracking camera similar to Xbox Kinect, and offers games based on popular IP such as Bluey, Peppa Pig, Fruit Ninja, Sesame Street, Barbie, Gabby’s Dollhouse and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
In an interview with The Game Business, Nex CEO David Lee explained how the company’s decision to not sell games for Nex, but instead offer a Game Pass-style ‘Play Pass’ – which gives access to every game in the library for a 3-month or 12-month period – was inspired by the “problem” Nintendo had getting casual players to buy more Wii games.
“One of the most important things we should do is learn from history and try not to commit the same limitations, and that’s why we have a subscription model,” Lee said.
“Nintendo expanded the audience with Wii. When you expand the audience, and they want different things, and they only buy Wii Fit, Wii Sports and not many others… that’s a bit of a problem.
“Who am I to speak for Nintendo? Nintendo obviously has a really great strategy on how they want to serve the audience. But, from our perspective, we want to build something sustainable. And if we build a platform and people come in and buy a couple of games and that’s it… the whole system is not sustainable. It’s just not.
“It’s very important that we set ourselves up to serve our customer continuously with new innovations, that is how the whole system can sustain. But it started with Wii. We are standing on a giant’s shoulder.”
Lee also said the Play Pass model allows for more creative freedom, as there’s less need to worry about trying to make games that will hit certain sales targets.
“We have much more creative freedom to pick what games we create,” he explained. “So not just, ‘oh, I need to stick to a certain genre because only those genres sell.’ We don’t really need to think about that. We think about how we serve our customer better, how we innovate for them, how we can surprise and delight them.
“Games that don’t need to have a business model on their own… the creative freedom just explodes. We can try that and see whether the customers like it. It’s more fun. It’s equally fun for customers, because they don’t know what we have in store for them. This year we created 20 new experiences and many more updates. We upgraded the OS as well. This is all enabled by the subscription model.”
Nex Playground is currently only available in North America, but the plan is to bring it to other countries in 2026.
