Joy-con drift. It seems like some can live with it, and we might not be able to live without it. We’re always looking for ways to fix Joy-Con drift on our own, using Australia’s consumer laws to get Nintendo to fix them, or just giving up entirely and just getting new ones.
It’s a dark plague that’s haunted the console for its entire lifespan (sans the Switch Lite which is a given) since the 2017 launch and despite the issue being known to Nintendo, the new OLED model did not include updated functionality for the controllers. In a past statement from Nintendo provided to media outlets, they advised users looking for a joy-con drift fix to contact Nintendo support for repairs. While this process can be done for free, it can take a while for the repair to be done which is precious time taken away from playing games or being able to use the Calculator.
Despite this, there might be a small glimmer of hope according to a recent interview by The Verge with Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser. When quizzed about the endless fight with joy-con drift, he said,
“As we’ve gone through the first five and a half years of the Nintendo Switch, we’ve observed gameplay, we’ve observed as people have returned units how they’ve worn, and we’ve been making continuous improvements overall to the Joy-Con, including the analog stick. This latest version, Nintendo Switch OLED, has the same updated analog stick that’s now available in the original Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch Lite.”
Is there any hope for the fight against joy-con drift?
Maybe. While it doesn’t look like the issue has been fixed for the OLED model, there seems to be a concerted effort by Nintendo engineers to fix it, as well as Bowser stating that they’re making ‘continuous improvements’ to the joy-cons. The Nintendo team have been generally pretty vague when it’s come to making statements around improvements to joy-cons, so this is probably the latest piece of hope that fans can grasp onto and a much clearer statement of ‘we’re working on it’ than they’ve gotten in the past.
For the time being, all we can do is wait and see, do any of the options listed above, or simply let the joy-con drift whisk us away into the sunset and hope that it doesn’t slowly walk us off a cliff.
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