The affordability crisis has put the industry in a tight grip. With hardware prices too high to support healthy audience growth and software often priced too cheap for many games to be profitable, we face the grim prospect that—at least for now—games in general are both too expensive for many consumers to tolerate and yet so cheap that much of the industry is on the brink of an economic crisis.
While there is some doom and gloom in this assessment, it's worth noting that crises also create opportunities for companies that are smart and agile enough to take advantage of them. The accessibility crisis is no different: it opens up market opportunities for companies and creators who can think differently about audiences and the products they might respond to.
It's hard not to wonder how major consoles are priced (not to mention the rising costs of building a PC) when you consider Circana's Mat Piscatella's fascinating data. published on Bluesky a few days ago: that in the last weeks of November, the PlayStation 5 came in third place in sales in the United States, behind not only the Switch 2, but also Nex Playground.
What?
… was the puzzled reaction from many gamers and even quite a few people in the industry. I won't claim to be that far ahead here, as I only heard about the Nex playground a few months ago thanks to friends with small children in the US who asked me about it. They heard about it from other parents at their children's school, suggesting the console is a huge success in word-of-mouth marketing.
Nex Playground is essentially the heir to the ideas behind Microsoft. Kinector, for a deeper dive into the history of the industry, Sony EyeToy. It's a cute little cube with a camera on the front, and the software is completely gesture controlled – there's no controller.
It comes with five built-in games and offers a much larger selection, including some major licensed children's games like Bluey and Sesame Street, with a monthly subscription that costs under ten dollars. The console itself has a suggested retail price of around $250, but is typically available for under $200.
This is a laser device aimed at families with small children and is extremely well designed for that market. Inexpensive hardware is essentially Android (compared to the ill-fated Come on then), but it runs a carefully selected selection of proprietary games—there's no risk of kids downloading games with expensive IAP transactions. It's all touted as a fun, safe and affordable gaming device for kids and their families.
It's important to note here that Nex Playground's success (while it's probably not causing platform owner executives to lose sleep just yet) comes from targeting a market that major platform holders have essentially abandoned. It’s not for nothing that I called the device the successor of EyeToy and Kinect; they not only inherit their technological concepts, but also their audience.
When console platform owners hit the emergency stop button on the escalator that used to lead to constant price reductions for consoles throughout their existence, they essentially abandoned this type of market and its associated software categories. Few families are willing to consider a $500 console with $70 games and complex and expensive controllers for their teenage children; They're certainly not enough for studios to focus on those games that really flourished when consoles reached mass-market price levels.
Dancing games, singing, collections of mini-games, quizzes; there are vestigial remnants of these genres on the Switch, but even Nintendo's pricing isn't tailored to that market, and perhaps hasn't been since the heyday of the Wii. Like Sony, it also released the Switch 2 at a significant discount as a Japan-only model, which I believe is the canary in the coal mine for accessibility more broadly. Some games in these categories have managed to make the transition to mobile devices, but overall these once-thriving genres have faded away.
However, the economics of the industry valuing equipment out of the hands of consumers—and certainly out of the hands of children—doesn't actually eliminate interest or demand for this kind of entertainment. Nex Playground's genius move really is to take one of Nintendo's founding ideas – making cheap, accessible and reliable devices using legacy hardware and a philosophy that's more like a toy maker than a tech giant – and use it to wedge itself into a market segment that other platform holders have either given up on or simply forgotten about.
The flip side of the affordability crisis, at least from a hardware perspective, is that there is a lot of low-end hardware on the market that is very cheap and quite functional. If you can get past having to worry about frame rates in Cyberpunk 2077, there are plenty of inexpensive chipsets that can easily support smooth frame rates in a quality kids' game or any casual game. The challenge, of course, is creating quality software that can take advantage of this cheaper hardware, but that's not something the right investment in good development teams can't fix.
Nex Playground has done very well in the children's market, and while it may not knock PlayStation out of second place very often, the positive reception it's receiving from families and strong word-of-mouth among parents suggests it still has plenty of potential ahead of it.
However, this is far from the only mass market audience that platform holders have tacitly abandoned in their pricing strategies in recent generations. While achieving these other blind spots will require a lot more creativity than just copying Nex Playground's strategy, there are plenty of opportunities for smart companies to fill gaps in audience segments that the industry has abandoned. At the risk of sounding like a LinkedIn post from the worst person you've ever met, a crisis can actually become an opportunity if you can look at it with the right eyes.
