For what it’s worth, we’ve had non-Hall Effect sticks for generations, and they’ve mostly been fine on everything else but JoyCons. We won’t know whether these actually are as fragile as original JoyCons were until we start hearing reports of broken sticks.
No, they haven’t. Old Xbox and PlayStation controllers often end up with stick drift being what kills them.
On top of that, newer games that have deadzone settings actually let you see how much games have to compensate for stick drift.
A normal ‘working’ controller, is likely unable to use the first 10% of it’s motion range because it has to filter that out for stick drift. That makes the controls feel way less responsive compared to a hall effect stick where you can eliminate or minimize the deadzone.
I have a feeling that most people play video games way more than I do. In 34 years of gaming, I’ve never experienced stick drift (not even on the Switch). The only joysticks I’ve ever had go bad on me were on the Nintendo 64. But they would literally wear out from plastic rubbing against plastic, never drift.
I had a lot of PS4 controllers get stick drift. A few minutes, some tools, and a lot of rubbing alcohol in the pot or whatever mechanism (the cube thatbis actually the analog stick) solved it every time. It’s dust. It’s dust and grime. It’s solveable.
Hard disagree. If you have a non hall effect controller long enough it will degrade. Its a frustrating issue even if you know how to repair it. At this point I just don’t buy those types of controllers anymore since there are other options often with better prices. I’m not as familiar with the joycon third party market though.
I’ve had non-Hall Effect controllers for as long as I’ve been gaming, which is to say since the N64, and JoyCon 1s are the only ones I’ve ever had problems with. This is brand new tech, we’ve lived without it before. Sure, it would be nice to have, but I feel like people are just hastily jumping to the assumption that these controllers will be just as brittle as JoyCon 1s were. That is an assumption we do not know.
Hall effect encoders/sticks are not new tech. They’ve been around for decades.
Remember the Sega Dreamcast? It came out 26 years ago and featured hall effect sticks in the controllers.
I still don’t have issues with the Joycons after a few years. We don’t use it a ton, but we do have kids mashing the joysticks in Smash and it has held up so far. We have two sets of Joycons and a Pro controller, and none have drift issues.
Seems like a really dumb move after how much the previous lawsuit must have cost them.
I’m sure they did some kind of cost/benefit analysis, but it’s still fucking dumb imo.
Yes. Their cost benefit never seems to include how negative my feelings for my switch became due to all the constant issues. It went from my favorite device to one I rarely touch.
Note: Hall effect sticks aren’t that much more expensive than potentiometer sticks (difference is less than a dollar at scale). However, they require more space than potentiometer sticks and if you’re doing something custom (which Nintendo always does) it can be a great big expense to change your manufacturing processes to insert tiny magnets into injection molded parts.
I suspect the latter is the reason why they abandoned using hall effect or TMR sticks for the Switch 2.
My wild speculation: Nintendo probably gave their engineers some design constraints that limited their ability to use off-the-shelf HE parts (everything I’ve seen really is too big). Rather than change the constraints slightly in order to make the product usable with such parts they stayed stubborn in the hopes that their engineers would come up with an innovative solution. This sort of thing can work to force innovation at really big companies—if they’re not super top-down in terms of decision making.
I’m sure that the Nintendo engineers came up with their own perfectly-workable HE/TMR stick designs but had them shot down in meetings where they discussed the manufacturing costs.
I’m sure they did some kind of cost/benefit analysis, but it’s still fucking dumb imo.
The host of what was yesterday the most viewed teardown on YouTube speculated that the string joycon magnets may interfere with hall effect sticks.
Of course it is. Unless they switched to hall effect sticks, which they already said they weren’t doing. For whatever reason, they still want to save the pennies instead of using the better component even after the previous issues and lawsuits. Why do companies insist on shooting themselves in the foot constantly?
Wht spend pennies when you can sell more conrollers? They know that Nintendo boys don’t care about money
They were literally forced to fix/replace broken joycons for free because of the drift issue. In case you weren’t aware. I sent two sets away to be fixed, all expenses paid.
That costs them lots of money.
Nobody fucked with that. Everyone just bought whatever new limited edition colors were out and moved on with their lives.
Probably made more from every schmuck who didn’t know they would be replaced for free and bought extra.
Yeah, exactly this. I’m sure they did the math.
While Nintendo is absolutely to blame for not fixing the situation, I’ve heard they were not going for hall effect sticks because of the interference with the joycons magnets.
Full disclosure, I have no Switch, Retrodeck Enthusiast here 😁
I design things that use hall effect sensors… The magnets in the joycons would not have interfered. Those magnets are:
- Too far away from the sticks to matter.
- Perpendicular/orthogonal to the magnets that would be in the sticks.
Besides, you can cram hall effect stuff super tight just by inserting a tiny piece of magnetic shielding between components. Loads of products do this (mostly to prevent outside magnets from interfering but it’s the same concept). What is this magic magnetic shielding technology? EMI tape.
There’s a zillion types and they’re all cheap and very widely used in manufacturing. I guarantee your phone, laptop, and many other electronics you own have some sort of EMI tape inside of them.
Just about every assembly line that exists for mass produced electronics has at least one machine that spits out tape a bit like a CNC machine (or they pay the cheapest worker possible to place it).
Thanks for the thorough explanation!
Then it’s a mystery why the didn’t use Hall effect joysticks. It the cost of the part so much more expensive?
So they decided that magnetic joycons versus a new rail design were worth another set of drift lawsuits.
Because any potential new drift lawsuit is going to cite the old one as clear proof that Nintendo knew what would happen, had the opportunity to change the design so it didn’t, and decided to do it again anyway.
Nintendo choosing the option that is actively worse for everyone including themselves goes well with my theory that Nintendo is actually just evil and making decisions based on spite and disdain for their customers and fans.
Bruh, go touch some grass.
The joycon connection isn’t the only use of magnets I believe. The steam deck has a bunch of magnets too and it’s the reason Valve didn’t include Hall effect sticks in that device. They did a bunch of field tests and found that they created more problems than they solved. Folks who’ve modded their ROG Ally with HES reported similar issues. It just seems like with the current tech they’re just not compatible with handheld consoles.
Pennies on one console become millions of pennies on millions of consoles. It’s obviously stupid but it’s all there is to it.
Which is just a footnote to Nintendo’s profits. Let’s not forget the difference between a 1 Million and 1 Billion is roughly 1 Billion.
You think it is important that the gain is small? For a company like Nintendo, number goes up means great! Number goes slight down, oh noes!
At scale a hall effect stick is about $0.25 more than a potentiometer version. That’s about $38,000,000 if they sell as many Switch 2s as they sold Switches.
Sooooo… Nothing. That’s basically a rounding error to Nintendo. Remember: That figure is over eight years.
If it means they won’t have lawsuits (which cost millions on their own), fewer returns, and happier customers it most certainly would be worth losing out on ~$5 million/year.
The part you’re missing isn’t the cost. It’s the potential sales from replacement joycons. If you’re going to make a devil’s advocate style, capitalist argument that’s the one to make.
I don’t think it’s any of that, though. I think it’s just management being too strict about design constraints (which I pointed out in an earlier comment).
Gotta cash in on people buying replacements after 6 months
Stop pushing down so hard on the sticks.
Damn, where were you when Nintendo got sued a few years back? Had they had this airtight defense back then, maybe they wouldn’t have had to spend millions of dollars repairing people’s broken joy-cons for free.
“You’re holding it wrong.”
Pressing down too hard breaks the pushbutton functionality. It has nothing to do with stick drift.
But since we’re talking about what causes things… You know what actually causes potentiometer-based sticks to fail fast? Sweat. That’s right!
The NaCL in your sweat—even the tiniest microscopic amounts—is enough to degrade the coating and the brushes on potentiometers. The more your hands sweat, the faster your sticks will degrade.
Got sweaty palms? Best to use hall effect sticks or save up to buy new ones on the regular! 😁
Also: If you allow your controllers to get really cold and regularly (and rapidly) warm them up with your hands while playing that can have a negative impact too.
It starts to separate the bottom half of the stick housing when you push on them hard all the time and causes it to drift. That’s why shimming them temporarily works.
‘probably’ doesn’t say a lot. Let’s wait and see
