Nintendo Switch Joy-Con Class Action Lawsuit

Submission 10,545

Part of a series on Nintendo Switch. [View Related Entries]

Overview

Nintendo Switch Joy-Con Class Action Lawsuit refers to an announced lawsuit being prepared against Nintendo due to a common issue with Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers called "drift," in which a character on the console will move in a direction without player input.

Background

On July 19th, 2019, the law firm Chimicles, Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith^[1] announced it was putting together a lawsuit against Nintendo due to numerous consumer complaints of Joy-Con drift, claiming that the Nintendo are shipping defective controllers. On the firm's website, there is a form players who have experienced the issue can fill out. The firm's announcement reads:

CSK&D has filed a class action lawsuit against Nintendo of America, Inc. (“Nintendo”) for claims relating to alleged defects in the Joy-Con controllers that are part of Nintendo Switch gaming consoles. The complaint, filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, alleges that the joysticks on Joy-Con controllers are defective, leading users to experience drift issues. Specifically, the complaint alleges that the joystick on the Joy-Con controllers will automatically register movement when the joystick is not being controlled by the user and interfere with gameplay. The complaint, filed on behalf of purchasers of Switches and Joy-Con controllers, brings claims under various consumer protection statutes as well as various warranty and common law claims.

Prior to the announcement of the lawsuit, the drifting problem had been complained about by numerous Redditors and commenters. On July 14th, 2019, Redditor LocusAintBad posted that Nintendo needed to address the issue, saying, "For $80 controllers I expected that the Joycons would be as sturdily built and properly functioning as the Wiimote and Wave Bird and even the N64 controllers were if not better quality, and it didn’t take long to find out they weren’t even remotely built as well as it’s predecessors."^[5] The issue has also been documented by numerous tech YouTubers. For example, YouTuber Spawn Wave documented the issue on April 6th, 2019, gaining over 368,000 views (shown below, left). YouTuber TronicsFix posted a video on July 5th, 2019 in which he attempted to fix several "broken" Joy-Con controllers. In Joy-Cons discovered to have drifting issues, Steve Porter of TronicsFix found that simply cleaning the Joy-Cons would eliminate the problem (shown below, right).

Developments

The lawsuit was covered by sites including Nintendo Life^[2] and The Gamer,^[3] the latter of which opined "It's hard to imagine that this lawsuit will go very far given that it doesn't appear to be any manufacturing problems on Nintendo's end that caused it." Redditor AntonioS3^[4] posted about the lawsuit, gaining over 37,000 points in /r/NintendoSwitch. In the thread, users reported en masse about issues with Joy-Con drifting. Spawn Wave posted a video about the lawsuit, noting that many were frustrated that Nintendo would not acknowledge there was an issue with their controllers.