Controller drift is certainly nothing new—analog sticks respond without actually being touched. However, what was once something we encountered from time to time now appears to have become commonplace. If you know a handful of people with a Nintendo Switch, then chances are you know someone whose console has suffered or is suffering from Joy-Con drift. You may have even experienced it yourself.
Even though some Switch owners claim to have suffered from drift as far back as 2017, the issue wasn’t thrust into the limelight until two years after that. That’s when the first lawsuit regarding Joy-Con drift was filed against Nintendo. Multiple suits have followed since then, and the hits just keep on coming. Most recently BEUC filed an official complaint to the European Commission. This came after it received individual complaints from 25,000 Switch owners from nine different countries.
Despite the number of lawsuits and complaints filed against Nintendo in regard to the drift issue, nothing much seems to have been done. In fact, the Switch Lite, which was released after the whole drift saga was kicked up a notch, has also been reported to suffer from drift too. An even bigger problem when it comes to the smaller console, since its Joy-Con controllers aren’t detachable.
There have been a couple of acknowledgments from Nintendo, and even an apology at one point. Nintendo will even fix your controllers for you for free, a service that has been offered since the lawsuits started rolling in. However, the problem doesn’t appear to have been fixed, at least not permanently. What’s more, now Xbox and PlayStation have gotten in on the action, and not in a good way.
Xbox has requested its drift case be dismissed, while DualSense was added to the mix this week as more and more PS5 owners report that controllers have already been suffering from drift. As is the case with Nintendo, DualSense owners can send their controllers back to Sony for repair. However, that could be costly when it comes to postage, and those with only one controller will effectively be left without a console for an undetermined amount of time.
That all three major console companies are suffering from the same issue suggests one of two things. Either they’re not sure how to stop their controllers from suffering drift over time, or they want them to. On the one hand, Nintendo has received so much bad press off the back of the Joy-Con drift saga, you’d think finding a fix would be a top priority. However, with the console closing in on 80 million units sold, it might be a problem Nintendo simply doesn’t deem all that important.
Something Nintendo has been accused of in some of the aforementioned lawsuits is planned obsolescence. The accusation that its Joy-Con controllers are designed to break so Switch owners will need to buy new ones. That’s pretty commonplace in technology today. A ploy by companies to make sure consumers purchase updated versions of tech rather than just stick with an older one for years and years. If that’s what is really going on here, then drift might well be something we just have to deal with from now on. If it strikes you, and chances are it probably will, it’ll be decision time. Go through the faff of a repair, or bite the bullet and buy a replacement.
