Report: Nintendo quietly owns up to “Joy-Con drift,” will repair for free

After months of mounting user complaints and media pressure, Nintendo appears to have finally caved in full to the issue of “Joy-Con drift” on its Nintendo Switch controllers.

Tuesday’s news comes courtesy of Vice Games senior reporter Patrick Klepek one day after a lengthy summary of the issue went live at Kotaku. Klepek’s report claims that if Switch owners report incorrect joystick data being fed to their consoles due to faulty joysticks, Nintendo’s customer service reps are authorized to offer a completely free, outside-of-warranty repair of affected controllers (after walking users through a troubleshooting process).

What’s more, according to Klepek, if users recently sought such a repair and were charged for the trouble, Nintendo’s reps may be able to offer those users a refund. Klepek cites “a source familiar with Nintendo’s updated customer support documentation.”

Joy-Con drift is a lot like that phrase sounds: even when a Switch controller’s joystick stays perfectly still, it may send movement data to your Switch. The system may also “resist” the direction you’re pressing in favor of a stuck direction. Due to the potentially mechanical issue of the failure, a simple system-menu joystick recalibration won’t fix it for affected users.

If this issue sounds familiar, that’s because Switch users have been complaining about it on various forums for months. Kotaku’s Monday article linked to a July 2018 post at Reddit, whose author alleged that they had sent eight Joy-Con controllers to Nintendo for the sake of joystick repairs. A lengthy April 2019 video from Spawn Wave includes a teardown of an affected Joy-Con controller to show exactly how the hardware’s current design leads to wear and tear on specific contact points, which is as good of a technical explanation for the defect as we’ve seen.

After all, Nintendo hasn’t formally commented on the exact cause of this issue (which I admittedly haven’t been able to reproduce in my six official Joy-Con controllers). In response to Vice’s questions about the reported drift issues, and the authenticity of Vice’s own report, Nintendo sent the following statement. Ars’ questions about the authenticity of the Vice report received the same statement in response:

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 https://ift.tt/LEV4gs so we can help.

The news follows years of complaints about another Switch gamepad, the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, which has suffered from a “mushy” d-pad since it launched alongside the Switch hardware in March 2017. I can report personal experience with that issue, as I sent both my retail Switch Pro pad and its first customer-service replacement back to Nintendo following my own complaints of unwieldy d-pad performance in early 2017. Users have gone on to suggest

a “tape” fix

, which requires opening up the Pro controller and affixing clear tape to any, or all, of the contacts where the d-pad touches the controller’s circuit board.

Another example of an early 2017 Joy-Con problem came in the form of wireless performance, which users took into their own hands with a single-wire soldering fix.