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Comment by Spoom | Hacker News Reader

I hope Nintendo is ready for the refund requests.

That would require them to give refunds at all, the eShop currently does not do that and no one fought them on it yet.

Realistically Nintendo can do whatever they want, they could take a dump in times square and people would flock to it. They've been selling broken controllers for 6 years.

I’ve always found this an interesting criticism. Switch controllers might break more often but I’ve never had a game system controller that didn’t end up with drift in the course of a year or two (and I don’t play games often.)

It's not just drift, even though that statistically is more likely to happen in JoyCons, there were/are quite a few issues with Switch controllers:

* Big connectivity issues for a long while after launch(I couldn't play on my couch with the switch in front of my TV)

* Aforementioned drift

* Sticky buttons on Pro controllers, those still happen

* None of the Nintendo controllers correctly advertise polling rate for BT HID, so they're impossible to use on most phones

All of that at more than premium prices, even in refreshed/newly produced units.

"Big connectivity issues for a long while after launch(I couldn't play on my couch with the switch in front of my TV)"

Did they somehow fix that? I basically gave up on my Switch for that reason. Having to lean forward on the couch to get the controller to reliably work was a dealbreaker.

I feel like it's better, they must have boosted the transmit power or something - it was basically unusable, so they probably had no choice. I can use them in that spot now anyway.

I used the same xbox 360 controller for PC gaming until I literally wore the tops of the analog sticks off and it never drifted. My Switch Pro controller started drifting after eight months.

I’m on the other end of the spectrum, play quite a lot of games have never experienced drift. Our switch controllers are a good 5yrs old at this point and seem fine. That said I suspect I’m an outlier, when we took our PS2 to tradein after 10+yrs of use the shop assistant remarked that the controlers looked barely used (definitely not the case), guess I just use controllers gently?

I have two Switches, neither have controller drift, that said, I gamed extensively for decades and game sporadically now. I've never had any first-party controller break, only third-party controllers. The only first-party console issue I've had was the RROD on the Xbox 360, and modified an Xbox 360 Elite to resolve this, and it /still/ works with its original controllers, and is still used sometimes.

That said, as far as first-party products go, the Sony Playstation controllers have been consistently the highest quality products across generations as far as controllers go, but from a feel perspective I prefer the Xbox controllers.

All modern joysticks (swtich, PS, and Xbox) are made by the same company with similar internal construction. This whole Nintendo is worse than sony, etc is questionable until there's a full characterization of the issue. In my experience, they all experience drift about the same. Until there's competition in the market, I don't see the issue improving. Nintendo certainly isn't going to start developing joysticks internally... Those days are long gone.

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