What we bought: The last gamepad I’ll need to buy for Switch and PC

engadget.com:

If you regularly play video games, there’s a good chance you’ve dealt with stick drift. You may be lining up a shot in Apex Legends or surveying the land in Tears of the Kingdom, and suddenly, you notice your cursor slowly dragging to one side on its own. This, to put it nicely, sucks. It takes you out of the game, and you quickly realize that your state-of-the-art $70 controller is now a degraded hunk of plastic.

The Switch’s Joy-Cons are infamous for developing drift, but PlayStation and Xbox controllers aren’t immune to it either. Over the past year or so, however, there’s been a mini-resurgence in controllers that use magnets and “Hall effect” sensors in their joysticks instead of traditional potentiometers, making them less susceptible to wear over time. A few months back, I grabbed 8BitDo’s Ultimate Bluetooth Controller, which costs $70, works with Switch and PC and has these Hall effect sticks.

Let’s take a step back. Most game controllers use analog joysticks with potentiometers, little electromechanical components that measure the stick’s position by sliding a contact arm (or “wiper”) against a sensor to read its resistance. This is generally precise, but because the wiper has to make repeated physical contact with the resistor, the mechanism will eventually wear down, increasing the likelihood of unreliable readings. Hall effect setups, meanwhile, use magnets and an electrical conductor that don’t physically touch. As the former moves in relation to the latter, the resulting change in voltage generated by the magnetic field is converted to positional data for the joystick.

This tech isn’t new, and Hall effect sticks still aren’t totally immune to drift. Everything breaks down eventually, and it’s always possible