During a recent financial Q&A, Nintendo finally apologised for issues caused by Joy-Cons but will not comment further due to the current class-action lawsuit.
Players have been dealing with what’s called Joy-Con drift as Kotaku was filed with Nintendo accused of not disclosing the defective Joy-Con controls. Nintendo was asked about this during this month’s financial meeting. A questioner mentioned hearing about the class-action lawsuit over Joy-Con malfunction and wanted to know what Nintendo was doing to improve the product.
“Regarding the Joy-Con, we apologise for any trouble caused to our customers,” said Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa. “We are continuing to aim to improve our products, but as the Joy-Con is the subject of a class-action lawsuit in the United States and this is still a pending issue, we would it like to refrain from responding about any specific actions.”
This appears to be the first official apology for the malfunctioning Joy-Cons.
Back in 2019, Nintendo issued the following statement to Kotaku regarding Joy-Con drift: “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.”
Comments
21 responses to “Nintendo President Apologises For Joy-Con Trouble”
You had the opportunity to fix it when you developed the Lite.
But you didn’t.
Something tells me if not for this class action lawsuit they would have never done anything at all. This issue is why I have yet to purchase a switch at all.
Does the lite even have Joycons? I thought the sticks were inbuilt (like the Vita’s). Or is this an issue with the unit’s gyrosccope (of which the OG Switch would have had one in each Joycon)?
It’s an issue with the Joysticks they use and not the Joycons itself. Something that props them up snaps/breaks which causes them to not stay centered. They knew about the problem and still changed nothing in the retail version. GREEEEDTENDO.
I have 3 sets of joycons (6 individual total) and 2 of the left ones have just started drifting simultaneously. Bit of a bummer. But I’ll level with you – as much as joy con drift sucks and is unacceptable from a consumer perspective, I don’t regret buying my Switch. That thing is just a little box of joy.
This might be a different story if I hadn’t got 2 years of solid gaming before the joy cons had given out, but there it is.
I recommend you go to Nintendo’s website for this. They will send you a replied paid envelope for you to send your joy con’s in. They will repair for free. Worked for me. I have heard some people had to pull the ACCC terms. But now that there is this law suit, most people I have heard from said they didn’t receive any resistance in getting it fixed.
Sorry could you confirm if you mean here:
https://www.nintendo.com.au/contact
And what about the Appraisal Charge? Do they try and make you pay one?
It is totally unacceptable about why you guys did not resolve in fixing this joy-con issue for the Nintendo Switch.
Even if one of you guys at Nintendo had not made one single mistake this joy-con issue would never have happened.
Gee James, I’m not sure that’s how it works.
Okay so we’ve established you think they should not have made Joy-cons that drift. Now what?
Also, sir, this is Kotaku.
Sony needs to apologise for the Vita 2000 model. Mine, and my kids Vita had the left stick go to shit. Meanwhile my og model is still working like a champ despite 8 years of use.
OLED FTW!
I just replaced my joycon’s joy stick because mine had serious drift issues. Two of the screws stripped because they weren’t great quality. I now have to replace these. It’s a great machine aside from this issue
my left joycon is totally unusable now – i have them unattached at the mo and just use a controller. are new joycons fixed? is it worth buying another set?
Send it to Nintendo for a repair. I sent my two joycons in recently and they replaced them for free.
I guess I’m one of the lucky ones where my joycons still work fine, for now. Touch wood.
My left is in the process of dying. If I hold the ‘down’ direction on the stick while in Animal Crossing, you can watch my character alternating between running, stopping, and crawling. All while I apply perfectly even pressure. Every other attempt to move the stick down through menu prompts just… doesn’t register. It’s fucked.
The thing is, stick drift is not just a Nintendo problem, it’s a massive problem with Xbox One controllers, I have 6 PS4 controllers and 4 Xbox controllers and 3/4 Xbox controllers have stick drift (the PS4 controllers – no issues), the one that doesn’t won’t work with headphones for some reason.
I understand the Nintendo thing is worse because these things are a part of the console but long suffering Xbox players have been putting up with this for years
Oh fuck off john_stalvern I don’t need to listen to your bullshit nonsense blame it on someone else.
I’m not saying this will work for everyone, but I was able to fix the drift with my left-hand Joycon using some Isopropyl Alcohol and ear buds.
I had to lift the little rubber ‘flap’ at the bottom of the stick and rubbed a lightly soaked ear bud around there. I was cynical, but after leaving it 5 minutes to air out, the damn thing actually worked properly and has since.
We are continuing to aim to improve our products?! Aim?! Way to add insult to injury!
This is quite un-amusing , as Nintendo of Australia is still claiming to be unaware of agreeing to honor the same “no questions asked and “no proof of purchase required” for any issue of joy con drift. Even though in an article published on Kotaku, a Nintendo of Australia representative said they would do just that. And only in the last week or so I also put it out there to kotaku and others, to consider following this up as it had been almost a year since the article was published. Especially given the pandemic and the massive uptake of the Switch during this time and the inevitable issues of joy con drift potentially arising out of heavy use. And then this comes out.