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.

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.

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.

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.

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 design things that use hall effect sensors... The magnets in the joycons would not have interfered. Those magnets are: 1. Too far away from the sticks to matter. 2. 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).

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).

I had a lot of PS4 controllers get stick drift. A fee minutes, some tools, and a lot of rubbing alcohol in the pot or whatever mechanism solved it every time. It's dust. It's dust and grime. It's solveable.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Nobody fucked with that. Everyone just bought whatever new limited edition colors were out and moved on with their lives.

Lots of people fucked with that. I sent them in for repair twice, I know other people that did. Why spend $80 when they'll fix their garbage equipment for free?

Yet more people just bought new ones, put the old ones in the box, and returned them for a refund while in the free return period, citing them as faulty. I don't own a switch but I know I would've done that at a large chain electronic shop rather than bother with the repair rigamarole.

I mean, not everyone is a liar.

Sure, but a lot of people are, and crucially nintendo is. Also, I'm saying this cost them also on the returns side of things even before the lawsuit.