Following the reveal of Steam Deck, a new handheld gaming PC meant to rival the Nintendo Switch, Valve is confident Steam Deck joysticks won’t drift like Nintendo’s Joy-Cons.
“We’ve done a ton of testing on reliability, on all fronts really – and all inputs and different environmental factors and all that kind of stuff,” said hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat to IGN.
He added, “I think we feel that this will perform really well. And I think people will be super happy with it. I think that it’s going to be a great buy. I mean, obviously every part will fail at some point, but we think people will be very satisfied and happy with this.”
Steam Deck designer John Ikeda noted that hardware involved were definitely considered. “We purposely picked something that we knew the performance of, right? We didn’t want to take a risk on that, right? As I’m sure our customers don’t want us to take a risk on that either.”
The Nintendo Switch has been infamous for its Joy-Con’s drifting, where a joystick keeps moving even if you haven’t touched it. Widespread drifting issues have led numerous class action lawsuits. Eventually Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa apologized “for any inconvenience caused to our customers” due to the drift.
Despite Valve being confident Steam Deck joysticks won’t drift, Nintendo has seemingly been unable to produce Joy-Cons that don’t produce drifting issues. Since July 2019 they have been repairing Joy-cons entirely free, even outside of users’ manufacturers warranties.
Valve’s new Steam Deck is now available for pre-order in three flavors: $399 (64GB), $529 (256GB), and $649 (512GB), over on the Steam store. To pre-order now you have to had purchased a game prior to June 2021, an effort to help block scalpers and bots.
