Report: Nintendo quietly owns up to “Joy-Con drift,” will repair for free

Enlarge / One guess as to how Nintendo will repair Joy-Con controllers suffering from a widely reported drift issue. (credit: Nintendo / Sam Machkovech)

After months of mounting user complaints and media pressure, Nintendo appears to have finally caved in full to the issue of "Joy-Con drift" on its Nintendo Switch controllers.

Tuesday's news comes courtesy of Vice Games senior reporter Patrick Klepek one day after a lengthy summary of the issue went live at Kotaku. Klepek's report claims that if Switch owners report incorrect joystick data being fed to their consoles due to faulty joysticks, Nintendo's customer service reps are authorized to offer a completely free, outside-of-warranty repair of affected controllers (after walking users through a troubleshooting process).

What's more, according to Klepek, if users recently sought such a repair and were charged for the trouble, Nintendo's reps may be able to offer those users a refund. Klepek cites "a source familiar with Nintendo's updated customer support documentation."

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