Is the Nex Playground worth buying for your family?

How the camera and motion tracking actually work

Here's the trick worth understanding: Nex Playground skips controllers entirely and uses a built-in wide-angle camera with AI motion tracking to read your kid's actual body as the input. Slice a fruit and the camera reads your arm swing. Duck a mole and it reads you ducking. That single design choice is what lets up to four players jump in at once with zero setup beyond an HDMI cable, because there's no motion wand to hand out or sync. The camera processes movement locally, so nothing gets stored or sent to the cloud, which matters more than it sounds like on a device marketed at five-year-olds and is part of why it's kidSAFE+ COPPA certified. But the mechanism cuts both ways: because gameplay is the whole product, the five included games (Fruit Ninja, Starri, Whac-a-Mole, Go Keeper, Party Fowl) are the entire experience out of the box. The full catalog, Barbie, TMNT, Peppa Pig, Elmo, Kung Fu Panda and the rest, sits behind a separate Play Pass subscription. That's not a hidden fee buried in fine print, it's a structural choice: the hardware is a camera and a processor, the games are a rotating library, and the maker is charging for the library separately from the box. Day-nine test time: five games is plenty for one rainy afternoon, but a kid who plays twice a week will burn through that catalog fast.