Summary
TwoNintendo SwitchJoy-Con drift lawsuits are reportedly on the cusp of being dismissed. The complaints over the widespreadSwitchcontroller issue were originally filed half a decade ago.
Nintendo has been targeted by multiple lawsuits over the Switch Joy-Con driftsince its popular hybrid console hit the store shelves in March 2017. The vast majority of those complaints either didn’t go anywhere or were won by the Japanese gaming giant.
Switch Joy-Con Drift Complainants Dropping Their Lawsuits
The reason(s) behind the plaintiffs' decisions to stop pursuing the matter is unclear. Game Rant’s review of publicly available court documents suggests that the Diaz vs. Nintendo case has been in arbitration since 2020. The Switch maker never denied the existence of Joy-Con drift, with Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa even apologizing for it in June 2020 in a rare move. However, the company has fought every single lawsuit stemming from the mass defect, insisting that the console’s end user agreement stipulates that disputes of this sort must be settled via private arbitration instead of public litigation such as class action lawsuits.
According to a mid-2022 study by British consumer protection group Which?,40% of Nintendo Switch owners have experienced Joy-Con drift. One in four people who did so never contacted Nintendo for support, as per the same source. The Japanese group, for its part, has long been fixing drifting Joy-Cons free of charge even outside their warranty period, at least in the United States and European Union. But user reports indicate that the underlying problem was never addressed.
Generally speaking, analog thumbstick drift occurs when dust and dirt find their way to a given controller’s electrical components, interfering with their operation and causing sensors to register input when there is none. In the case of Nintendo’s hit console, the frequency of theSwitch Joy-Con stick drift may have been exacerbated by a design flaw, according to another Which? study published in late 2022. Nintendo will likely have another go at addressing this purported shortcoming soon, as the upcoming Switch successor is widely reported to feature a similar hybrid design with detachable controllers to that of its predecessor.
Nintendo Switch Lite
The Nintendo Switch Lite was released in 2019 as a low-cost, handheld-only game system. It’s designed specifically for handheld play, offering a lightweight design as part of its portable offerings. The controllers are built into the system for handheld play, unlike the larger Switch models. The console itself retains full functionality as a standard Switch, but it does not support docked mode.
