Two Joy-Con drift lawsuits have been dismissed after five years

Two significant lawsuits over Nintendo Switch Joy-Con drift have been dismissed in the US courts.

According to Game File, Diaz vs Nintendo and Carbajal vs Nintendo, which were filed in 2019 and 2020, have both been dismissed. The suits alleged that Nintendo knowingly sold defective controllers.

Game File reports that both Nintendo and the parents who brought the suits on behalf of their children called for the cases to be dismissed.

‘Joy-Con drift’ is a recurring issue with the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers in which a stick can register input when there is none. For example, a controller with Joy-Con drift could be left completely still, and yet the player’s character could be moving slowly in any direction.

While there are tools within in the Nintendo Switch itself to attempt to counteract this, the issue has persisted throughout virtually every iteration of the controller.

Stick drift is a potential issue with any controller with a standard analogue stick, and becomes more likely as the stick wears out. However, Joy-Cons appear to be particularly susceptible to the issue.

In 2022, a former supervisor at a Nintendo Switch Joy-Con repair centre in the US claimed the company was inundated with faulty controllers.

An ex-employee told Kotaku that at one point “easily thousands of Joy-Cons were coming through each week”. They added: “We ended up having to set up an entire new workspace just for Joy-Con repair.”

Customers who sent in faulty Joy-Cons from 2017-2018 were reportedly sent new replacements, but after the first year, it’s claimed the repair center was required to repair every set of controllers.

In response to the legal action and player disappointment, Nintendo issued an apology in 2020 over the issue, but argued that players who purchased the items were bound by the user agreement of the Nintendo Switch and thus ineligible to participate in a class action lawsuit against the company.