Steam surface is designed to avoid deflection by sticking

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Photo: Valve / Kotaku

Thumbstick drift is a nasty, frustrating problem that seems to be becoming more and more common on some consoles and devices. Valve is aware of these issues and says it has conducted a range of tests and selected high-quality, reliable parts to avoid the “risk” of stick drift becoming an issue with Steam Deck devices.

In an interview with IGN with Valve designers and engineers who worked on Steam Deck, the company claims that it is fully aware of the ongoing controversy regarding joystick skew and that it is trying to avoid this situation. To do this, Valve made it clear that it has run a “large number of reliability tests” of various Steam Deck parts and believes customers will be “extremely pleased” with how the device is performing.

“I think it would be a great purchase,” hardware engineer Yazan Victims explained in an interview with IGN. “I mean, obviously every part is going to fail at some point, but we think people are going to be very satisfied and happy with that.”

According to Valve, the other step in the company’s plan to combat stick drift is to use parts you know have high performance quality. “We didn’t want to risk this, right,” said John Ikeda, Steam Deck designer. “I’m sure our clients don’t want us to risk that either.”

Read more: I despise Joy-Con Drift, but I’m learning to live with it

This all sounds good and important because unlike the Switch or PS5, which have had drift issues in the past, Steam Deck controller inputs are built right into the hardware, making repairs more difficult and more expensive than simply buying a new console.

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Photo: valve

Stick drift has long plagued Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons, with fans recently discovering a potential solution to the problem with cardboard. PS5 consoles have also experienced stick drift. Things got so bad that some people brought back lawsuits against the console makers who produce these consoles.

Valve announced the Steam Deck, a laptop capable of playing high-end games, earlier this week and opened pre-orders shortly after. While pre-orders ran into a snag early on, things have calmed down a lot since then. The base version of the device starts at $400, a price that Valve president Gabe Newell said was “painful” to achieve.

Meanwhile, distributors have already made a rush and are trying to sell pre-records on eBay for $2,000 in some cases.

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