A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how there’s no way in hell I’m going to unnecessarily splash cash on a Switch Pro if it doesn’t come with a hefty performance boost and controllers that actually, you know… work. Joy-Con drift is one of the most brazen examples of anti-consumer practices in the games industry, and the fact it has yet to be rectified is ridiculous. You’re telling me it’s unreasonable to hold off on forking over hard-earned money for a new, supposedly enhanced machine that still makes it so every menu I have to navigate is like a neverending slot machine? Nah, bud. Keep your Switch Pro, thanks.
Earlier this week, Nintendo casually revealed a trailer for a new, improved Switch. It’s not the Switch Pro, mind, which makes the fact it barely improves on the base Switch at all slightly less difficult to stomach, but it’s still just… not worth buying. There’s no performance boost, the memory is still rubbish despite a small increase, and guess what? It uses the exact same Joy-Con as the 2017 version. Great! For the totally reasonable price of just $399, you can have a brand new Switch with a slightly brighter screen, 30 minutes of extra battery life, a LAN port approximately 0.1 percent of people will use – which is sold separately, mind – and the same completely broken controllers. What a bargain!
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Most gamepads suffer from drift to some degree. Several people reported having experienced drift with the DualSense a few months after the PS5 launched, which is… not great. I’m not sure how prevalent it’s been since then, but I know for a fact that it’s a hell of a lot less visible than the whole Joy-Con debacle has been over the last four years.
This is because Nintendo has had multiple lawsuits filed against it specifically for Joy-Con drift. It’s one of the most high-profile scandals in modern gaming, except for some reason people rarely discuss it beyond memes. It’s like, “Aye, it’s a bit shit, but it’s Nintendo, what can you do?” Sure, Nintendo makes the best games. Sure, the Switch is magical, in some ways. And sure, Adam down the road probably isn’t going to be able to do very much against a mega corporation with more money than the bank he’s got his savings account registered with. That doesn’t make it any more acceptable to sell what is, essentially, a defective product. All Joy-Con will inevitably experience drift – that should not be the case with expensive hardware.
Video game hardware revolves around generations, which means these machines are consciously designed to have life cycles. It’s like modern cars – you get one, and then a few years later, you’re probably going to need a new one. It’s a concept called ‘planned obsolescence’ and it’s the same reason your iPhone starts to perform worse when a new model is announced. You drive a Volkswagen Golf built in 1995, though? That thing is indestructible. You could punch it repeatedly with an industrial crane and all that would happen is that you’d owe like, a million quid to the crane company for repairs. I don’t know how much crane arms cost, but I’d imagine it’s quite a lot. You get my point – game consoles these days are like modern cars, in that you’re not supposed to be able to buy one and have it be perfectly usable forever.
PlayStation and Xbox are guilty of this too, as per the whole definition of what a generation is. But at least their products work for a while – Joy-Con shit themselves so fast it’s as if they’ve been consciously designed to be anti-consumer. “Sorry, if you want to keep using your 300 quid machine, you’ll need to give us yet another 50 quid, which will buy you maybe another six months of drift-free gaming.” That is outlandish! Absurd! Completely, absolutely, unequivocally not in any reasonable human being’s interest! You! Do! Not! Need! To! Defend! Enormous! Capitalist! Anti! Consumer! Corporations!!!
For what it’s worth, I get called a Nintendo Guy all the time. I love Pokemon and Zelda, probably too much. I am one of those irritating idiots who will defend Nintendo no matter how stupid or annoying it makes me look. So, with that in mind, it’s worth acknowledging the fact that me, a person with Pokemon tattoos and thousands of hours in Zelda, is saying that Joy-Con drift is a hot pile of steaming bullshit. I can’t believe the audacity of the Switch OLED model – a slightly improved, more expensive version of a four-year-old machine that fails to fix its most damning problem. It’s like a Hard Drive headline – “Nintendo Promises To Take More Of Your Money To Continue Experiencing Joy-Con Drift.” That is honestly what is happening here. I was already pretty pissed about the Switch Pro based on the premise it might not fix drift, but this hits on a whole other level. Please don’t buy it, folks. Recognize when you’re being touted anti-consumer rubbish, yeah? For God’s sake.
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