Last week, Valve’s highly anticipated Steam Deck was launched and we’ve already been treated to videos showing Gabe Newell, the company’s president, hand-delivering some of the orders to commemorate the moment. As with any big release though, some issues have also been making their way out there as well — a few Steam Deck users have reportedly suffered from joystick drift and have taken to Reddit, to demonstrate the problem.
As you can tell from the name, stick drift occurs when the character, cursor, or directional view corresponding to a joystick continues to move, even when you aren’t actually moving it. The issue isn’t exactly a new phenomenon and has plagued Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons, essentially since the console first launched in 2017, prompting a class action lawsuit two years later. Nintendo now repairs Joy-Con controllers that suffer from drifting, for free.
