Welcome to Lowpass! This week: Nex’s motion gaming console makes a splash, and Plex goes public … with movie reviews.

What’s it like to take on Xbox, PlayStation & Co.

For the longest time, game consoles were a three-horse race: Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have been competing fiercely against each other for over two decades, and successfully defeated any would-be newcomers.

That’s why former Apple engineer David Lee wasn’t exactly greeted with open arms when he told people that his computer vision startup Nex wanted to take on the big guys of console gaming. Sure, Nex had seen some success with its games on mobile platforms, and was even once featured on stage during an Apple event. But hardware? With a few dozen employees?

“So many people said: Are you guys crazy? Nobody has succeeded in trying to introduce a new kind of gaming hardware,” Lee recently recalled.

However, over the last two years, gaming’s big three have suddenly gotten some competition from unexpected places: Meta’s Quest VR headsets, which are arguably game consoles for your face, outsold major consoles for two holiday seasons in a row. Valve is taking on Nintendo in handheld gaming. 

And when Nex began promoting its Playground console in retail stores last fall, it burned through its entire inventory within days. “Walmart was the first to sell out, just days into the promotion,” Lee said. “Amazon sold out on the morning of Black Friday. Two days later, Best Buy told us they’re out.”

“We are beating every retail expectation,” Lee added. “We’re sold out everywhere. The demand outpaced the supply two to one.”

Nex Playground is, in short, a motion gaming console optimized for young children and their families. The device, which looks a bit like an oversized Rubik’s Cube, features an integrated wide-angle camera to track players, and use their body movements to control games. You can use your arms to slice through watermelons in Fruit Ninja, dance along with the Barbie Dance Party and even play a platformer game like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Rooftop Mayhem entirely with jumps, karate chops and other body movements – no controller required.

Motion gaming itself isn’t new; Microsoft was first to use its Kinect camera for game play, and Meta shipped some casual motion games alongside its Portal TV device. Both companies have since abandoned those products because they couldn’t find a proper product market fit. Lee believes that Nex’s focus on young players and their caretakers gives the company an opportunity to succeed where others have failed, and also points to Nintendo’s Wii with its more active and fitness-focused gameplay as a predecessor of sorts.

“We’re going into a proven market that Wii and Kinect established and vacated with a product that is a lot more intentional serving the audience,” Lee told me.

That’s not to say that Nex is selling millions of units yet. Completely overwhelmed by demand and sold out in most stores during much of the holiday season, Nex managed to ship over 140,000 devices last year, according to Lee. Now, the company is working on optimizing its supply chain ahead of a significant retail expansion: Nex’s goal is to expand from around 1000 stores to date to a total of 5000 stores this year.

Nex is not the only company making waves with unique gaming hardware. Meta’s Quest 3s headset outsold all of the legacy game consoles on Amazon last year, and its Quest 3 and Quest 2 models outsold Nintendo’s most popular Switch model as well as Microsoft’s Xbox. (Amazon’s public numbers suggest that Nex’s Playground console sold as well as Nintendo’s most popular Switch in December.)

Shipping significant numbers not only validates Nex’s model, it also helps the company to gain real-world exposure and feedback. “We’re seeing what kind of games get a lot of play,” Lee told me. Among the most popular titles are sports games, which has prompted the company to look for ways to safely incorporate toys and workout gear into physical gameplay.

Nex also plans to keep working with big brands like Mattel, Paramount and Universal to bring their IP to its platform. Unlike other game console makers, the startup isn’t charging for individual games, but makes titles available through a subscription plan that costs Nex owners $89 a year. “The business model works,” Lee told me.

Of course, the old adage that hardware is hard remains true, and doubly so in 2025: President Trump’s planned import tariffs could cut into Nex’s hardware margins, and any resulting cutback in consumer spending is likely going to have a negative effect on the entire entertainment industry.

Still, at least for now, Nex is enjoying the momentum, and the fact that it was able to make a dent against much bigger competitors.

“We are building a product next to Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox and Meta Quest with 70 people,” Lee said, adding after a long pause: “I still can’t believe it.”

Plex takes first steps towards becoming a community for TV fandom

Plex users can now publicly review movie and TV shows, and start discussions about shows with other members of the Plex community. The streaming platform rolled out a first set of public-facing community features this week, and has plans to make a big push around community in the coming quarter.

“We want to help people connect with content, and connect with others around content,”said Plex Chief Product Officer Scott Olechowski during a conversation earlier this month.

The initial roll-out of these community features is somewhat modest, and builds on some of the internal social networking functionality incorporated into Plex in recent years. Plex members can now decide to make parts of their profile public to other users on the service, and even opt to have a publicly discoverable profile that can be browsed by non-members on Watch.Plex.tv.

They can also decide to give the Plex community, or the public at large, access to their ratings and reviews, which are being incorporated into Plex’s catalog of movies and TV shows. That’s especially interesting because Plex doesn’t just list titles available as part of its own streaming service, but also indexes content from third-party streaming services, and even movies still in theaters.

In the future, Plex wants to further build out profiles, Olechowski told me. “You will be able to create custom lists,” he said. “A list of [your] favorite kids shows, shows to vacuum to, or whatever. I can subscribe to that. I can follow you. I can follow that list.”

“We’re going to give people who are content junkies a forum for discussion,”  Olechowski said.

In addition to the new community features, Plex also launched a preview version of its upcoming TV app for Apple TV owners – something that Lowpass was first to report on in early January.

What else

The tech to build the holodeck. When I started working on a feature about Gaussian splatting for The Verge, I didn’t expect it to become so personal …

Netflix announces price increase following blockbuster quarter. After surpassing 300 million paying subscribers and $10 billion in operating income, Netflix is once again raising its subscription prices.

Leadership changes at Amazon’s IMDb. IMDb’s founding CEO Col Needham is stepping down.

What Creative Commons plans to do next. The non-profit overseeing the Creative Commons licenses just published its plan for the next three years, which includes “developing tools that encourage sharing in the age of AI.”

Google and Samsung are working on AR glasses together. Some had expected that Samsung would unveil its first pair of glasses at this week’s Galaxy Unpacked event. Instead, we got a vague commitment to a future AR product, and another look at the company’s Project Moohan headset.

Meta will release Oakley smart glasses this year. The glasses will be made by Meta partner EssilorLuxottica, according to Bloomberg, which is also reporting that Meta may introduce a high-end model with built-in display this year.

Broadcast TV is dying. Trump isn’t helping. Trump’s threats against news coverage he doesn’t like could accelerate the decline of broadcast television, reports Wired.

The Brutalist AI debate is really dumb. Video production newsletter VP Land the discussion about using AI in Hollywood is lacking nuance.

Google acquires part of HTC’s Vive team. To expand its work on Android XR, Google is spending $250 million on “some of the HTC VIVE engineering team.”

That’s it

Last week, someone snarkily noted in the Lowpass Slack community that they had never gotten advice on how to cook beans in a tech newsletter before … to which I say: That’s too bad! But also: Point taken. So this week, I instead end the newsletter with an AR/VR tidbit:

Greek startup HaptikOS is set to come out of stealth at MIT’s Reality Hack event this coming weekend with what appears to be another set of haptic gloves — except, a teaser video (and some non-public stuff I have seen) actually shows a device that looks more like an exoskeleton for your hand, without the glove. I’m intrigued! And couldn’t help but engage in some light sleuthing, during which I discovered that HaptikOS is run by the same team as the EU-funded Magos Gloves project and that the HaptikOS website TOUs describe the site’s purpose as facilitating “the purchase of Haptikos gloves and haptik_OS Unity SDK.” We should have more, uhm, tangible information within days.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

And many thanks to Kochava for sponsoring this edition of Lowpass.