Labubu's New Gaming Handheld Is Dropping This Week

Labubu is getting a glow-up, and this time it comes with buttons. Pop Mart is launching a Labubu Gaming Handheld on October 23, 2026, a pocket-sized gadget that lets you run a tiny café, collect items, snap photos and play mini-games with friends. The overseas listing puts the price at roughly fifty dollars, with the US online drop set for the same day. For a character that started as a blind-box plush, this is a genuine level-up: Labubu is now hardware.

What the gadget actually does

The device, officially called THE MONSTERS Shake A Drink Gaming Handheld, leans hard into nostalgia. The core loop is café management: you run your own little drinks spot, collect items, customize your space and play mini-games, with multiplayer options for playing alongside friends. A built-in camera lets you take photos and turn them into stickers, and a USB-C port exports your screenshots and pictures. In other words, this Gaming Handheld is equal parts game console, camera and collectible, designed to be clipped to your bag as much as actually played.

Collectors get two looks to chase. The regular edition, called NUT, wears the classic yellow-and-brown Labubu colors. The PEACH secret edition is a pink, MOKOKO-inspired variant, and because this is Pop Mart, pulling it is not guaranteed. The blind-box mechanic is baked right into the hardware launch, which tells you everything about who this is for. Promotional images show both colorways clipped onto bags, leaning into the bag-charm era Labubu already owns, a trend we explored in our piece on the viral analog bag carrying a Labubu keychain.

The timing is part of a bigger power move. The same day the handheld drops online in the US, the company is opening a flagship store on London's Oxford Street, at 149-151 Oxford Street, with doors opening Friday morning, as reported by Retail Tech Innovation Hub. The brand already counts seven standalone stores and nine London locations overall, and the new flagship promises a full new-experience concept. A product drop and a flagship opening on the same date is not a coincidence.

There is a clear ancestor here: the virtual-pet handhelds of the late nineties, updated for the blind-box generation. The difference is distribution. Where those toys lived in toy aisles, this one launches through a hype-driven drop model borrowed from sneakers and streetwear, complete with a secret edition that rewards the lucky and frustrates everyone else.

Why a Labubu console makes perfect sense

Step back and the strategy is obvious. Labubu already owns Halloween 2026. The plush went from blind-box obsession to the season's defining costume, as we covered earlier this month. Turning the character into a playable Gaming Handheld extends the franchise beyond the shelf and the costume rack, into the one place Gen Z actually lives: interactive screens. It also lands at a moment when retro handhelds and cozy games are surging, and when low-stakes, cute gaming is outperforming grim blockbusters with younger players. According to Lobang, the main attraction is running the café and collecting rather than traditional pet-raising gameplay.

The counterpoint is the blind-box of it all. Folding a secret-pull mechanic into a gadget launch means some buyers will pay full price and still not get the colorway they wanted, the same frustration that defines the blind-box aisle, now with a screen attached. Critics of the model call it gambling-adjacent. Fans call it the thrill of the hunt. For parents buying for teens, the ages-fifteen-and-up guidance is worth noting, since the camera, photo sharing and multiplayer features assume a user old enough to navigate them.

The honest read is that this is not really about the games. The café sim is simple by design, and nobody is buying this for the graphics. It is about owning a piece of the Labubu moment that does something, a collectible that justifies its shelf space by being fun for a week and cute forever. Whether it sells out in minutes like the season's hottest Halloween drop or lingers in stock will say a lot about how far the Labubu wave can stretch. Either way, the monster with the tall ears is not going back in the box.