Be Remarkable
Building things that matter, even if only for a few at first.
People who know me well know one of my superpowers: I can sleep anytime, anywhere. Very few things can keep me up at night. In my professional career, I can only remember two such incidents. I’ll let you in on the second one today—and save the first for another time.
It happened early in the Nex journey, when we were building HomeCourt.
Remarkable, but niche
HomeCourt’s shot tracking was remarkable—an engineering marvel at the time, and it still is. Just months into building it, Steve Nash was advising us. I was invited to demo it to Steph Curry. It was used by some of the biggest names in basketball. Apple put us on stage. The NBA invested in the company.
But shot tracking was niche. Very few people care about their shots so much that they’d want to track them with an app. Using it required having a hoop to yourself and setting your phone on a tripod—most people just wouldn’t do it. For those who did, HomeCourt was a godsend.
At that time, about ten people left Apple to join me—blindly pursuing an idea we all knew wasn’t that big on its own. The trust placed in me, and in each other, was enormous. We believed we’d eventually figure out the bigger idea together.
The fear of breaking that trust kept me up at night.
Mass market, but shallow
But that fear also drove us to explore, to experiment beyond basketball—something that might appeal to a wider audience. We created reaction training games on HomeCourt.
Apple thought it was innovative and gave us the prestigious Apple Design Award. They even demoed it on stage: two players standing six feet away from an iPhone, playing our reaction game on a small screen. I remember watching and feeling… something wasn’t right.
That feature set eventually became Active Arcade. During the pandemic, it went viral—millions of downloads, hundreds of millions of play sessions. But users left as quickly as they came. It didn’t form a deep relationship with most.
The screen was too small. Many people tried it. It was… okay.
To make it truly remarkable, we needed to bring the experience to the big screen and create something deeper, more meaningful. That evolution became Nex Playground—a journey that took years to materialize.
The Work Ahead
As we look ahead and think about how to serve our users better, what lessons can we draw?
Real progress happens when we commit to building something remarkable—the size of the audience matters, but it’s secondary. What matters is creating something that forms a deep relationship with those it touches. We can’t please everyone all the time—but we must please someone, deeply, some of the time.
Committing to being remarkable moves us forward.
This is the question I’ll be asking all our internal and external game studios:
Why is this new game remarkable?
Especially now that our platform is past the phase of “not enough games,” our challenge is no longer quantity—it’s quality with purpose and soul.
In 2026, this is what we’ll commit ourselves to.
For the games already loved by our players, we’ll work to take them from good to great—from remarkable to legendary. Expect exciting updates to Starri, Mirrorama, HomeRun Heroes, and many others.
For the new games we’re building, we’ll make sure each one pushes boundaries—offering something new, unique, or unexpected. Some may start small, but they must be minimally magical.
In the next few posts, I’ll share our behind-the-scenes quest for remarkability in some of the games we shipped this year—and what we learned along the way.
Stay tuned.