Here's How Nintendo Is Handling Joy-Con Drift
Doug Bowser is the new head honcho at Nintendo of America, and despite his villainous name, he's actually a pretty good guy. He understands that Joy-Con Drift is a real and serious issue that has been punishing Nintendo Switch owners. The Verge released an interview today wherein he told us how the company is handling the plague of Joy-Con Drift.
"We are continuously looking at ways to improve our products as we go forward, but in the end we want consumers to have a great experience. And if in any case they're not having that experience, we encourage them to contact our customer support groups and we'll do our best to help them through that. That has been how we've been handling our consumers over the last few months as issues like this have arisen, and we believe that consumers are finding their way back to great gameplay experiences."
What can be done about Joy-Con Drift?
Basically what Bowser is saying is that Switch owners will need to contact customer support. This has been the strategy from the beginning, when these issues first became publicized. Vice News reported that it got its hands on an internal document from Nintendo, which instructed customer support to offer Joy-Con Drift fixes for free. Many consumers have also reported that, after contacting Nintendo, customer support has generally offered to fix the problem for free, even if the malfunctioning Switch was past its warranty date. Neither Bowser nor Nintendo has said that this is the company's official policy, but gamers have reported that this is how they managed to overcome the curse of Joy-Con Drift.
Joy-Con Drift appears to be a hardware issue. It causes the analog sticks to randomly move, inputting phantom commands. Frustratingly, this seems to be especially effecting left Joy-Cons, which control movement. Therefore, players have found that, when idle, their characters will move on their own.
Nintendo is aware of and cares about players experiencing Joy-Con Drift. That internal document said that their goal is to fix these issues and "quickly handle these questions to restore consumers smiles." It appears that, thus far, the company is doing just that.