A class-action lawsuit regarding the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Con controller problems has prompted a simple response from Nintendo on the matter.
“At Nintendo, we take great pride in creating quality products and we are continuously making improvements to them,” said a Nintendo representative to Kotaku. “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.”
Kotaku also notes that Nintendo has since updated the front page of its support websites to make it easier for users to quickly request a Joy-Con repair. It seems that the previous version of that page just referred users to an FAQ page about the subject that offered basic advice.
What about that lawsuit, though? Well, the whole thing started when more and more fans noticed that their Joy-Cons suffered from a problem regularly referred to as drift. Basically, it seems that Joy-Cons have a tendency to register input from the controllers even when the user hasn’t given any commands. Most people say this problem occurs over time, but some say that they’ve encountered this problem as soon as they started using their Joy-Cons.
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Not long ago, the law firm Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith decided to represent fans in a class-action lawsuit against Nintendo over the reportedly defective controllers and what fans perceived to be a lack of action on Nintendo’s part. Indeed, the core of the lawsuit is that Nintendo was aware of these problems but did nothing substantial to fix them.
Lawsuits such as these rarely result in any prolonged court battles, but it seems that it may have inspired Nintendo to take a slightly more proactive approach to the issue by making it easier for users to contact the support team and request a controller fix. The problem now is that it seems some users report the problem returns after a certain amount of time even after the controllers have been fixed. This once again suggests a problem with the design of the controllers themselves.
It’ll be especially interesting to see if Nintendo does something to address this problem with the rumored Nintendo Switch Pro. As for the upcoming Nintendo Switch Lite, it doesn’t use traditional Joy-Cons, so it shouldn’t suffer from any controller issues (or at least not the ones plaguing the current Joy-Con models).