Summary
- Two Nintendo Switch Joy-Con drift lawsuits are close to dismissal after half a decade of litigation.
- The plaintiffs behind the complaints, filed in 2019 and 2020, have asked for them to be dismissed in the first half of May 2024.
- Nintendo may have another go at fixing the root cause of Joy-Con drift in the near future, as the Switch 2 will reportedly feature a similar design to that of its predecessor.
Two Nintendo Switch Joy-Con drift lawsuits are reportedly on the cusp of being dismissed. The complaints over the widespread Switch controller issue were originally filed half a decade ago.
Nintendo has been targeted by multiple lawsuits over the Switch Joy-Con drift since its popular hybrid console hit the store shelves in March 2017. The vast majority of those complaints either didn't go anywhere or were won by the Japanese gaming giant.
Nintendo Hints at What the Switch 2 Will Look Like
Shortly after confirming when it will reveal the Switch 2, Nintendo drops a major hint about what its next console will look like.
Switch Joy-Con Drift Complainants Dropping Their Lawsuits
Two more such stateside cases now appear to have fizzled out, Carbajal vs. Nintendo and Diaz vs. Nintendo. The former was filed in 2020, while the latter emerged a year earlier. Both of these Joy-Con drift lawsuits were brought forward by parents on behalf of their children, alleging that Nintendo had been selling controllers that it knew were defective. After half a decade of proceedings, the litigants asked for their complaints to be dismissed during the second week of May 2024, Stephen Totilo reports via his triweekly newsletter Game File.
The reason(s) behind the plaintiffs' decisions to stop pursuing the matter is unclear. The Best War Games's review of publicly available court documents suggests that the Diaz vs. Nintendo case has been in arbitration since 2020. The Switch maker never denied the existence of Joy-Con drift, with Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa even apologizing for it in June 2020 in a rare move. However, the company has fought every single lawsuit stemming from the mass defect, insisting that the console's end user agreement stipulates that disputes of this sort must be settled via private arbitration instead of public litigation such as class action lawsuits.
According to a mid-2022 study by British consumer protection group Which?, 40% of Nintendo Switch owners have experienced Joy-Con drift. One in four people who did so never contacted Nintendo for support, as per the same source. The Japanese group, for its part, has long been fixing drifting Joy-Cons free of charge even outside their warranty period, at least in the United States and European Union. But user reports indicate that the underlying problem was never addressed.
Generally speaking, analog thumbstick drift occurs when dust and dirt find their way to a given controller's electrical components, interfering with their operation and causing sensors to register input when there is none. In the case of Nintendo's hit console, the frequency of the Switch Joy-Con stick drift may have been exacerbated by a design flaw, according to another Which? Study published in late 2022. Nintendo will likely have another go at addressing this purported shortcoming soon, as the upcoming Switch successor is widely reported to feature a similar hybrid design with detachable controllers to that of its predecessor.
Nintendo Switch Lite
- 4K Capabilities
- No
- Power Source
- AC Power and Battery
The Nintendo Switch Lite was released in 2019 as a low-cost, handheld-only game system. It's designed specifically for handheld play, offering a lightweight design as part of its portable offerings. The controllers are built into the system for handheld play, unlike the larger Switch models. The console itself retains full functionality as a standard Switch, but it does not support docked mode.
Checkbox: control the expandable behavior of the extra info- Brand
- Nintendo
- Screen
- 5.5” Touch Screen
- Processing Power
- 0.
- Storage
- 32GB
- CPU
- Custom Nvidia Tegra X1 processor
- Battery
- Li-on battery (3570mAh)
- Dimensions
- 2.76 x 7.8 x 7.09 in
- Weight
- 0.61 lb
- RAM
- 4GB DDR4
- Screen Resolution
- 1280 x 720 (720P)