Switch 2 May Eliminate Vexing Joy-Con Drift as Nintendo Patents New Magnetic Joystick Tech

wccftech.com:

Anyone who’s owned a Nintendo Switch knows one of the system’s most vexing issues is analog stick drift. Basically, with enough wear and tear, joysticks will start drifting in a certain direction, so that even if you leave your thumb off the stick, your avatar will continue to slowly move. It’s annoying, and an issue that affects almost all modern controllers, but it seems to be a particular issue for the Switch’s itty-bitty Joy-Con controllers. Those analog sticks are so small that they just wear out faster – again, anybody who’s owned a Switch for any length of time has probably replaced several sets of Joy-Cons.

Despite the issue of Joy-Con stick drift being well-known for years, Nintendo hasn’t done anything about it, although that may finally change when the company’s next console arrives. Nintendo recently filed several new patents, one of which is new joystick that uses magnetic fluid to register movement. While the precise technical details may differ somewhat, this parent sounds similar to a “Hall Effect” joystick.

For those unfamiliar, most modern analog sticks contain a potentiometer that uses actual physical electric contacts to register movement and are thus prone to wearing out. On the other hand, Hall Effect sticks use magnetic fields to detect movement without any physical contact, and thus don’t suffer the same kind of wear and tear issues. While no major first-party controllers use this tech yet, some third-party peripherals have begun to offer it.

Now, again, it isn’t entirely clear that Nintendo is working on a traditional Hall Effect joystick. It seems like they may be making something slightly different, but magnetic fields are definitely a big part of it. At the very least, it seems there’s a good