The Steam Deck will not suffer from Switch-like drift, says Valve

The announcement of the Steam Deck was met with a great deal of excitement. Being one of Valve’s first major forays into the gaming hardware market, the Switch-like portable gives PC players a new way to game. Being a handheld device however, some fans have expressed concern at the attached analogue sticks – though according to Valve they need not worry.

Ever since its launch in 2017, the Nintendo Switch has suffered from what has been called ‘Joy-Con Drift’, leading to broken controllers and even lawsuits against the Switch manufacturer. It seems that Valve has learned from Nintendo’s mistakes, as the Steam Deck reportedly will not suffer a similar fate.

Speaking on the analogue sticks, the hardware engineer for the Steam Deck, Yazan Aldehayyat said “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. I mean, obviously every part will fail at some point, but we think people will be very satisfied and happy with this.”

Adding to this, Designer John Ikeda claimed that the company “purposely picked something that we knew the performance of” as they “didn’t want to take a risk on that,” with him concluding by stating that “I’m sure our customers didn’t want us to take a risk on that either.”

While the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Con drift has been a major issue, one of the saving graces for the console is the fact that the Joy-Cons are detachable, meaning that those suffering from drift needn’t replace the whole system. With how Valve has built the Steam Deck and its embedded controllers, it is encouraging to see that the team focused on ensuring that the handheld doesn’t suffer from analogue stick drift.

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KitGuru says: Do you own a Switch? Does it have Joy-Con Drift? Did you pre-order a Steam Deck? Let us know down below.

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