The Nintendo Switch launched back in 2017, but owners of the system say that the console’s detachable controllers still feature a defect that makes their joysticks prone to ‘drifting.’
It’s an issue being called Joy-Con Drift, and something Kotaku called attention to in a story earlier this week. The issue is that, after a few months of use, the joystick on Nintendo’s Joy-Con controllers will start to detect input when left untouched, causing in-game cursors and cameras to slowly drift in a direction despite the joystick being left in a neutral position.
Kotaku says four, or around a quarter, of its Switch-owning staffers have faced the issue, and Switch owners on social media echo the same concerns in both the Reddit threads and tweets at Nintendo featured in Kotaku's writeup.
Nintendo does offer repairs for faulty hardware, but those affected by the issue argue that they’ve only subjected their controllers to normal wear and tear and shouldn’t have to ship their Joy-Cons in for repairs. Especially since, as Kotaku points out, a pair of Joy-Cons are comparable in price to, if not more expensive than, other first-party console controllers out there that don’t face similar problems.
Nintendo did recently (and quietly) announce a couple of hardware changes to its base model Switch console, but those changes focused on getting more playtime out of the console’s battery, rather than addressing Joy-Con concerns.