Joy-Cons are great, except when they stop working. And for a lot of gamers using the Nintendo Switch, that’s a growing number of people. Switch owners across the globe are well aware of this issue, but for those not in the know, here’s the rundown. It comes down to one major problem, drifting.
The rumblings over this issue have been around since the console launched. The drifting issue is actually pretty common problem for console gamers. Usually analog sticks and their mechanisms are primary culprit, often causing input lag or phantom inputs that cause a player-character to move unprompted. I’ve even had this issue on my Xbox One quite recently.
Many gamers complained about other design oversights as well, like accidentally being able to put the Joy-Con on “backwards” and then being unable to remove it from the main console. There were other problems with Bluetooth connectivity reported as well.
And just like the latter issues, this drift problem has caused a wellspring of tutorials for DIY fixes to pop up, sadly not all of these solutions help, and some gamers are left with no choice but to purchase a replacement set of controllers. As one can imagine, this expense angers plenty of people. Especially since a pair of Joy-Con costs $80, a fair bit more than the cost of a typical first-party Xbox or PS4 controller.
This week though, things got a lot more heated and complex. Law firm Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith (CSK&D) filed a class-action lawsuit against Nintendo over said issue. The law firm has actually been building the case for a while, asking gamers affected by this hardware problem to report the issue to them as part of the arbitration process.
The focus of this suit is “joysticks on Joy-Con controllers are defective, leading users to experience drift issues.” And as the suit further elaborates, a defective Joy-Con may “register movement when the joystick is not being controlled by the user,” causing problems with normal gameplay.
If you want to check out the filing in more details, the complaint in its entirety is available here.
No word yet on when or if this suit will land in a court, as it will need to go through some level of judicial review before ending up in front of a judge for a ruling. This process could go on for a while, as Nintendo will no doubt argue against the issue and try to downplay its importance and volume of impact.
Though Nintendo has yet to publicly acknowledge the widespread problem, or offer a full fix, but this lawsuit is likely to prompt more serious action.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t popup again with the new Switch revision that was just announced, because that would mean major trouble for the Japanese gaming giant.
