Nintendo’s Joy-Con drift issue won’t go away

No one likes the Joy-Con drift. In fact, the Joy-Con Drift is so bad that Nintendo has been the victim of numerous lawsuits for well documented problem. Well, Nintendo can add another lawsuit to the pile. A Canadian law firm, Lambert Lawyer, filed a class action lawsuit seeking compensation for anyone in Quebec who purchased a Nintendo Switch, Switch Lite, Nintendo Switch Pro controller or Joy-Cons.

If you and all of your Switch-owner friends have miraculously avoided the Joy-Con drift, the problem is that after a while (sometimes not even a very long time), the Joy-Cons start triggering ghost movements on the screen, that you are actually touching the joystick. Lambert Avocat notes that his client discovered that his left Joy-Con was drifting after 11 months. After sending them back to Nintendo for repair, two months later, the correct Joy-Con started to drift. She then bought a second pair of Joy-Cons and a Nintendo Switch Pro controller – all of which were ultimately on display. Joy-Con Drift.

The firm claims that the Joy-Con drift “constitutes a material, serious and hidden flaw” that was not properly disclosed by Nintendo, consumers would not be able to detect faulty Joy-Cons just by looking at them, and everything in all violates Quebec Consumer Protection Act. (If you live in Quebec and have purchased one of the above products since August 1, 2017, you, too, can apply be part of the trial.)

Nintendo Joy-Con drifting legal woes cover the globe. There is one in Illinois, another in California led by a child and his mother, and another in Washington which was later changed to include Switch Lite a week after its launch. By IGN, at the end of last year, nine European consumer organizations said they had received nearly 1,000 complaints about the Joy-Con drift and called consumers to report their concerns for a potential investigation. A French consumer protection organization has also filed a complaint against Nintendo, alleging that the drift and Nintendo’s continued inability to permanently remedy the drift was evidence of planned obsolescence.

Clearly there is a problem here and Nintendo knows it. No, seriously, they know because, like our sister site Kotaku reported Nintendo chairman Shuntaro Furukawa last year apologized in a financial question and answer session. “When it comes to the Joy-Con, we apologize for any issues caused to our customers,” Furukawa said, before citing a class action lawsuit as the reason Nintendo couldn’t comment further on how it was having the Joy-Con. intention to resolve this mess. He has since added an entire Joy-Con repair section to its customer support website.

Consumers and consumer organizations are right to be pissed off, but it’s not their job to fix the Joy-Con drift. Yours has really gone astray with two sets of Joy-Cons, both after less than six months of use. And as long as it’s good, Nintendo will repair Joy-Cons for free, it is useless if after the repairs you continue to have the problem. Buying replacement Joy-Cons also loses its luster when there’s a good chance these too will eventually drift. You end up with a periodic repair or replacement cycle that you probably didn’t factor into the original purchase cost. Either way, that’s bad form for any gadget maker.

There are a lot of theories out there as to what actually causes the Joy-Con to drift – some say it’s dust and debris sneaking into the controller, others argue it’s wear of the contact pads. But until Nintendo explains why, publicly commits to a more permanent fix, or updates the design of the controllers, the Joy-Con Drift isn’t going anywhere. And neither are the lawsuits.