A patent filed by Nintendo suggests that they’re working on Hall Effect style joysticks for the Switch 2 that would eliminate stick drift almost entirely.
A patent filed by Nintendo suggests that they’re working on Hall Effect style joysticks for the Switch 2 that would eliminate stick drift almost entirely.
I really think that something changed with a major potentiometer manufacturer in the past few years. I don’t recall stick drift on a PS2 controller that I used for many years, but I’ve seen it on a number of controllers from different vendors recently.
Only thing I can think of other than recent hardware problems is that maybe the controller hardware imposed a certain amount of deadzone at one point in time and stopped doing so in newer gamepads, and that masked the drift.
I’ve heard a lot of hearsay that that is the case. Tech savvy people have taken apart some sticks and say that analog stick quality has taken a nosedive in recent years. Maybe it is just the effect of this sort of thing being discussed on the Internet more often, but I don’t doubt the veracity. I’ve had a few older controllers that I retired because of external wear whose internals were totally fine. Seems like controllers like Dualsense and particularly Switch Joycons are just poorly made.