The Steam Deck just launched, but a few owners are already reporting stick drift

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

The first batch of Steam Decks is starting to arrive to the lucky few who could order them on Friday, but a handful of the handheld gaming PCs already appear to be showing signs of joystick drift.

Joystick drift is an issue that causes your character or cursor in a game to continue moving even when you aren’t actually pushing the joystick in a direction. It’s a problem many have experienced with the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Con controllers. While Nintendo itself has suggested the issue will never be fully addressed because Joy-Cons will wear down over time, it does repair drifting Joy-Con controllers for free. Drift doesn’t just appear on Joy-Cons, though; some have reported drift issues with the PS5’s DualSense controllers, and now it seems the Steam Deck’s thumbsticks may be susceptible to drift as well.

In three different videos from the Steam Deck subreddit, you can see times when one of the thumbsticks continues to register an input while the user isn’t touching the stick. Two of the users even showed the issue registering in the Steam Deck’s calibration checker.

While the drift issues are potentially worrying, especially since it’s appearing on brand-new Steam Decks, it’s unclear how widespread it might be. In an interview with The Washington Post, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais estimated that “tens of thousands” of people are getting their Decks, but there are still only a few videos documenting the problem. And my colleague Sean Hollister told me Tuesday that the joysticks on his review unit, which he has been actively testing for three weeks, haven’t shown any drift issues so far — they stayed perfectly zeroed even when he tried the same calibration checker shown in two of the videos on Reddit.

Valve didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But the company has already committed to offering replacement parts for the Steam Deck at some point — including thumbsticks — so if you see stick drift on your Deck, you’ll eventually be able to swap out parts on your own. iFixit will be one of the authorized sellers of Steam Deck parts, though it’s still unclear when you’ll actually be able to buy them or for how much.

Unfortunately, if you’re experiencing Steam Deck thumbstick drift right now, you can’t buy a replacement part for yourself. But one of the people affected on Reddit put together a guide on how you can calibrate a thumbstick’s dead zone in the device’s settings, which could be a short-term solution.

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