It looks like Nintendo has finally started to address the ongoing furor over Joycon drift with an official statement on the ongoing controller saga.
For those of you that splashed out on the Nintendo Switch when it came out, may now be starting to find that you are suffering from a few issues wrangling Link in the right direction or finding the Mario is off to take a break somewhere off-screen. This tendency for some Joycon analog sticks to begin providing input to their connected Switch consoles without any intervention by the owning party has caused a fair bit of consternation over the last few months.
While nobody has a definitive break down of what is causing the malfunction, this could be an issue with general component wear, dust interference, or something utterly different that most of us aren’t aware of. In any respect, Joycon Drift appears to be a real thing. We’ve stayed relatively silent over this issue while things have developed, even when a Class action lawsuit was filed against Nintendo by law firm Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith. Now, Nintendos has made a first few steps towards acknowledging the issue.
In a statement to The Verge Nintendo said the following:
“At Nintendo, we take great pride in creating quality products and we are continuously making improvements to them. We are aware of recent reports that some Joy-Con controllers are not responding correctly. We want our consumers to have fun with Nintendo Switch, and if anything falls short of this goal we always encourage them to visit http://support.nintendo.com so we can help.”
More definitively, Kotaku followed this with
“We are aware of recent reports that some Joy-Con controllers are not responding correctly. We want our consumers to have fun with Nintendo Switch, and if anything falls short of this goal we always encourage them to visit http://support.nintendo.com so we can help.”
This might not seem like much, but it might provide some small glimmer of hope for anybody hoping for a more complete solution than buying a whole new Joycon Controller or stumping up for a repair at nearly face value. It also, hopefully, represents an understanding that the new Nintendo Switch Lite cannot afford to suffer from this issue either.
With everything that’s been swirling around in this issue, I’ve been lucky enough to avoid this problem. How about you, is your Switch drifting you to distraction?
