Name: The Best-Selling Console You Never Heard Of
Uploaded: 2026-03-02T21:31:45.000Z
Duration: 11 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

When I heard that the Xbox wasn't the top seller this past holiday season, it didn't come as that much of a surprise.

Adverbs of degree

But then I learned it wasn't even in the top three.

That's right, the box in third was less X and more nex.

Well, if you found yourself missing the days of Wii bowling on the couch, this modestly specced cube has been quietly providing the solution becoming the go to box for family gaming over the last year.

But while the brand is undeniably fun and friendly, offering up old school local multiplayer fun for gamers and their game curious friends and family, not to mention that its Entire catalog is KidSafe plus COPPA certified, there are some modern games industry habits that make it a little less wallet friendly than it might seem at first glance.

Maybe if I glance at it a third time, I'll see something that makes me feel a bit better about it.

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That's like super not cool of them if you ask me.

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The packaging for the NextCube is delightfully well organized.

The console itself, a power cord, an HDMI cable to connect to your TV or monitor, and

All gameplay input is handled by this little guy right here.

An ultra wide lens camera that accommodates full body motion controls across as many as four players.

First though, let's talk about behind the lens where there's an ARM based computer that should perform about like a mid range phone from a couple of years ago alongside a dedicated AI co processor that shockingly is not shoehorned in for no reason.

It offers benefits to both latency for your controls and surprisingly, privacy.

See, having a local NPU on the playground turns your movements into a trackable skeleton that eliminates any need for the camera to capture any video and allows it to run completely offline.

Only using the Internet to authenticate your account during setup and to download games to its 64 gigs of non expandable storage that has 5 games pre installed out of the box.

The gameplay tells us a lot about the age group that they're targeting with this device.

Just a shy bit younger than the average billionaire.

But unlike Jeffy E and his friends, NEX is also interested in attracting an older audience and snuck in some more compelling gaming experiences based on two of the best selling rhythm VR games.

It basically asks beat saber or synth riders.

I think we all know which one I want to play, man.

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Since there's only an AI assisted camera feed, the playground infers depth rather than mapping it out like its spiritual predecessor, the Xbox Kinect, which used IR in order to perceive depth in some games.

You can even see some of the 18 tracking points that it uses to guesstimate your position in 3D space and the positioning of your joints.

Now, when you're looking out for it, you can tell that this approach gives up some accuracy, even compared to much older body tracking solutions.

But it also made way for the ultra wide lens that makes the playground usable very close up in smaller living spaces and or with more players.

And if you're a latency nerd, you are going to notice that.

But it is responsive enough that kids and even casual adults should be able to overlook it.

One of our new writers had two college stage girls over Weird Flex.

Anyway, the point is, it was while he was working on this project and they ended up not only trying out the next playground, but

Which, okay, less impressed, but it's not as bad as it sounds either.

For the blissfully unaware, it's pretty much the Just Dance of nex.

And like much of the rest of their game lineup, it is a small game, but

it includes content from surprisingly mainstream artists.

They even got a couple of dula peep tracks.

These are just a few of the many titles that become available on the NextCube once you subscribe to Nexus Play Pass, which, uh, oh, this is where that wallet unfriendliness comes in.

See, none of these games, even Bluey Bust a Move, can be purchased outright.

There's no app store, so you either play the five games it comes with, and

yes, that whack a mole thing we showed you earlier counts as one entire game, or you pay the monthly subscription to get access to the entire game library forever.

And you know that your kids are gonna lose their minds if you miss a payment and all of a sudden their next cube turns into a lame cube.

Obviously the easiest way to avoid that disappointment is to just never let them try any of these games in the first place.

But let's say you're one of the millions who bought one of these already.

I gotta say, if we're measuring based on sheer quantity, I'm actually pretty impressed.

There are up to 55 games now, and they've been adding about 20 per year.

With that said, most of the games are more like arcade games than like the rich gaming experiences that you might expect on a different console or on a PC.

I guess the upside of the games being kind of simple is that each title only takes up roughly 400 megabytes of space, which helps to stretch out the usefulness of that 64 gigs of onboard storage.

Now at this point I can practically hear you screaming mobile grade graphics, no raw input tracking, no third party games, not to mention a subscription.