Mother And Son Sue Nintendo For Joy Con Drift

Some Nintendo Switch players have experienced the ‘Joy-Con drift’ issue- where the Switch Joy-Con controllers make in-game characters “drift” even when no one is moving them. While some would just get new controllers, some players’ Joy-Con drift was too ingrained to the point that buying new controllers won’t make the issue go away permanently. This was what happened to Luz Sanchez’ son. She filed a class action lawsuit against the company for not doing enough to fix a hardware problem common among Nintendo Switch controllers, as Wired detailed:

Joy-Con drift is pervasive among Switch devices. (Anecdotally, I’ve experienced it on two sets of my own controllers). Characters inch left or right as if a ghost was operating the console. Nintendo didn’t acknowledge the problem much until July 2019. That month, a thread on the Nintendo Switch subreddit calling out Joy-Con drift received over 25,000 upvotes. More than a dozen Switch owners filed a potential class action lawsuit at the time calling Joy-Cons “defective.” Lawyers said Nintendo had heard users’ complaints for long enough; why didn’t the company disclose the issue?

The 2019 lawsuit has been moved into arbitration, and the plaintiffs' lawyers recently asked Switch users to submit videos describing their experiences with Joy-Con drift to help bolster their case. Last month, a French consumer group filed a complaint, too, alleging planned obsolescence.

Nintendo began fixing Joy-Cons for free, post-warranty, in July 2019, and Nintendo’s president apologized for the problem in a financial meeting this summer. But Sanchez’s lawyers argue that Nintendo hasn’t done enough to fix the issue or warn customers about it up front. “Defendant continues to market and sell the Products with full knowledge of the defect and without disclosing the Joy-Con Drift defect to consumers in its marketing, promotion, or packaging,” the complaint reads. “Defendant has had a financial motive to conceal the defect, as it did not want to stop selling the Products, and/or would need to expend a significant amount of money to cure the defect.”