Poll: Have you experienced drifts on your DualSense PS5 controller?

While we’re big fans of the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller, no hardware is completely free from flaws. For all of its fancy features, such as haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, it’s a very technical kit, and so there are bound to be one or two issues that crop up. To our knowledge, nothing is too widespread, but the number of people reporting analog stick drift on the DualSense is increasing.

If you’ve never heard the term “drift” in connection with controllers before, it refers to an issue where the pad detects input on the sticks when there is none. For example, the camera pans in a first-person shooter without even touching the right joystick. Here’s a video that pretty much sums it up:

As Kotaku found, users called out the DualSense drift as early as 10 days after the PS5 launched. Apparently, this is a fault covered by the controller warranty, which means Sony will repair or replace your questionable pad. However, depending on where you live, you may need to pay shipping costs to send your DualSense to the company. Not ideal.

Having said that, our experience with PlayStation UK customer service has been quite positive. One of this author’s DualSense controllers suffered from a different issue in which one of the triggers lost resistance. After explaining the situation over the phone, an email was sent containing a printable postage label, allowing us to send the pad free of charge. A few weeks later, a new controller arrived at the post. We can only imagine that this fairly painless process would be the same for a DualSense with drift, or any other hardware issue.

Obviously, the PS5’s controller isn’t the only one handling drift. Any controller with analog sticks is potentially susceptible to this, the most notorious example being the Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons. Still, it’s a frustrating flaw if this happens to you, and not what you expect from your brand new console. Have you had issues like this with your DualSense? Take our survey and discuss it in the comments section below.