Hi everyone and welcome to edition 127 of The SEG3 Report! We’re still on sports, believe it or not, diving into the new NFL FLAG Heroes x Nex game.

Plus, our speed reads:

Let’s get into it.

One of my favourite video games is Mario Kart. I’m terrible at it, but there was a period of time when my brother and cousins and I would play a lot, and at some point we got so good that we would all lie upside down on the sofa and try to play that way - our heads dangling towards the floor. It’s one of those memories that, put simply, makes me feel good. And even now, when my brother and I play with his fiancé and my partner, or when I reminisce with my cousins, I can still tap into that feeling as if I were a kid again. 

Preamble over! It matters, I promise.

Nex, the company behind the motion-tracking console Nex Playground, has partnered with the NFL to launch NFL FLAG Heroes, a body-controlled flag football game featuring all 32 clubs. There’s no remote, no strap, and no controller. Instead, you use your body. If anyone else is having flashbacks to some dangerous Wii playing sessions, you’re not alone, but Nex has built “safe motion” into its design. It’s also made for people who want to have fun but are either unfamiliar with, or not particularly fussed by, American football. (Like yours truly!)

Every match is two two-minute halves, players build and captain their own quarterback rather than just picking a pre-made team, and there's a coach-led tutorial before anyone's first game.

There is, on the surface, something rather nice about how straightforward this launch feels. It’s about licensing and developing fandom. But, much like the adidas x Toca Boca integration I covered a few weeks ago, there’s a bit of wholesomeness at its heart too, and that’s getting people moving, together. 

Okay, so the cynical take on this - and, really, any brand chasing kids through gaming - is that it stems from an anxiety about not capturing the attention of the upcoming generation. But the NFL doesn’t actually have this problem. Morning Consult's research found the NFL is Gen Alpha's favourite league by a wide margin, with half of parents of under-11s saying their child is already a fan.

What the NFL and Nex are doing is deepening a fandom that’s already there, which makes it far more likely those young fans grow up and stay fans. 

As we covered in edition 94, SuperAwesome's fandom research found the golden age for discovery sits around age 8, and that roughly a third of fandoms get abandoned somewhere between ages 4 and 18. Just because a kid likes your team - for whatever reason, whether that’s a mascot, an inherited fandom, because the jersey is your favourite colour, or because it’s your home town - that doesn’t mean that attachment will survive that drop-off on its own. What gives fandom longevity is feelings; memories of playing with your cousins, your friends, your parents.

Ed Kiang, the NFL's VP of Interactive and Experiential Licensing, and SEG3 London alumni, said that fans essentially never age out of the NFL once they're in, but that if they don’t capture a fan before they turn 18, they never get the chance to. 

In short: the question at the heart of the strategy isn’t ‘how to get more fans’; it’s how to make sure the ones it already has continue to care.

Though I’m not going to make an argument about the safety of actual football, I was relieved that the game Nex is going with is Flag football and not the whole running full pelt into another human being version. And it isn’t like the two are at loggerheads (sorry, bad pun?). NFL has been investing in Flag football since the 1990s as a way to get people into the sport in a lower-cost (and lower-risk) way. 

Sportico's reporting traces the NFL's flag investment back to the 1990s. Since the 90s, Flag football has become the USA’s fastest-growing youth sport, with an estimated 1.5 million kids playing in 2025 alone, and will debut as an Olympic sport at the games in LA in 2028.

Aspen Institute's Project Play data shows flag overtook tackle as the most common way kids aged 6-12 play the sport back in 2017, and the gap has widened every year since.

So, NFL FLAG Heroes is building another channel in an area it already has authority and isn’t asking its fans to do anything else besides play on a device that’s likely already switched on in your living room.

NFL FLAG Heroes didn't come out of nowhere. Nex's first official sports league partnership was with the NHL, which launched NHL Puck Rush back in October 2025 to coincide with the console's expansion into Canada which we covered in edition 80. It's simpler to play than FLAG Heroes, with the objective being to score as many goals as you can against the clock.

At the time of launch, NHL exec David Lehanski framed the game as letting hockey families "blast slapshots without needing a hockey stick," which is basically what the NFL is doing, but with a football.

Nex also committed publicly to "additional titles in partnership with global professional sports leagues, including the NBA" through the rest of the year. 

What's changed between NHL Puck Rush and NFL FLAG Heroes is the scale of the game design. Puck Rush was an arcade-style challenge, but FLAG Heroes is built for longer-term play. It has a three-tier ladder, and a quarterback players build and keep across matches.

This is absolutely not to say NHL Puck Rush is less ambitious. It came first, and it proved that not only did Nex know what it was doing, but that it had a format it could scale up for other sports. And here we are! 

The NFL already has a genuinely successful digital home in Roblox: NFL Universe Football. But what Nex brings is a different sliver of the Venn diagram of fans, rather than risking splitting - or cannibalising - its existing one.

Speaking at SEG3, Ed said the NFL’s platform choices aren’t about chasing wherever gaming looks trendy; it's about whether the NFL can deliver something authentic that also matches what that specific platform's users actually expect. Roblox's own Lisa Wlette, on the same panel, added that the average sports fan on Roblox is 18 years old.

18-year-olds are exactly who NFL Universe Football is built for, and it’s not at all the audience using Nex. Nex Playground is designed for kids aged five and up, played with a parent in the room.

Livewire's family-gaming research, which we covered in edition 61, found 74% of families are gaming together during the traditional 5-10pm prime-time window, with 96% of parents open to brand integration inside that. As such, NFL FLAG Heroes has parent trust built in, which is what an 8-year-old's "golden age" moment needs. And it isn’t something a mobile platform can necessarily offer.

Nex has spent the last year building out its catalogue in a deliberate way. It has partnered with kids' IP for that parental trust (Bluey, Peppa Pig, Sesame Workshop, Hasbro, NBCUniversal), music and pop culture for edge (a BTS-branded experience with HYBE), a beloved underdog football club with a huge global fanbase for international charm (yes, it’s Wrexham AFC), and now another major US professional sports leagues.

NFL sitting alongside kids IP may not seem like a natural fit, but in actuality it is - because of the platform and gameplay itself. It’s built for kids, and for family.  

It may not always be that the strongest platform is the one with the most reach. In this case, it’s the one that reaches an audience at the life stage your own channel doesn’t already have access to.

And for Nex, what broadening its catalogue across sports and entertainment does is keep its users coming back through return mechanics built into the game to inspire players to keep engaging.

There are a few things about this partnership that, despite not being a sports person, I quite like. Strategically, it’s a solid way of solving the NFL’s ‘engage the kids before they lose interest in the fandom’ problem. And Nex gets a platform-native way to keep families coming back once the novelty of the console might fade.

Usually, brands ask fans to watch, scroll or buy. This is asking them to get up and move, in the same room, together.

So going back to my opening anecdote, what I think is truly the most ambitious - and exciting - part of this whole thing is that Nex is asking people to do: play together. The memories that are made by doing that mean so much, and years later inspire people to reach for that same game, cheer for that same team, and keep coming back to the things that brought them that joy to begin with. 

At its 12th annual Developers Conference, Roblox revealed new innovations and updates at its 12th annual Roblox Developers Conference

TL;DR

Why you should care

The Wallet change is actually a bigger deal than it might seem on the surface. Previously, creators had to wait to hit a threshold amount and then request a conversion, and then wait again for remuneration. That's fine for a hobby, but if you’re trying to build a career as a creator, that becomes a challenge.

Automatic daily payouts in real currency changes that. Roblox paid out $1.7 billion to creators in the 12 months through June 2026; payouts that grew from $923 million in 2024 to $1.5 billion in 2025 (as shared by Roblox during the conference). But until now, those amounts were predicated on a system that didn’t quite match Roblox’s ambition. Now, with a digital wallet and physical card, creators can earn and spend the money without ever leaving the Roblox ecosystem.

The distribution change is also fascinating. Roblox has historically been a walled garden: you played Roblox games inside the Roblox app. With the introduction of Roblox Everywhere and Play on Web, a Roblox game can now be accessed via its own branded app or a link that opens straight into a browser. 

This shows Roblox is prioritising reach, but it also jeopardises the self-contained ecosystem already in place. Now, a player who discovers a game through a standalone app or a shared link is a player Roblox didn't have to convince to download its own app first, but it's also a player who may never think of what they're playing as "a Roblox game" at all and may never make that next leap into downloading Roblox or playing other Roblox titles.

What these changes signal is that Roblox is shoring up the parts of the business that don't show up in a daily active users chart. Given that player numbers have cooled from last year's peak, Roblox is making a strategic choice that a more reliable, more professional creator economy and broader reach is what can rebuild it, if indirectly.  

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