A patent from Nintendo suggests that they're working on a magnetic joystick system, aka hall effect joysticks, which would solve stick drift.
A patent filed by Nintendo suggests that they’re working on Hall Effect style joysticks for the Switch 2 that would eliminate stick drift almost entirely.
Seriously....idk why they are so....obtuse to fixing shiz sometimes. Granted we are talking about the same company that won't embrace fan work the same as Sega so they're kinda backwards imo. Esp since that stuff usually isn't making money or is free promo for the real shiz Ala streaming and reviews. They're not very smart imo on a lot of things and seem to punish fans for having fun with shiz too much...
I still wonder what was so special about my N64 joysticks that I never experienced drifting. They'd recalibrate every time you turned the console on (or held some key combination) and after that were golden.
Yeah, except they were also so horribly designed that normal use literally grinds away the plastic at the base of the stick until it starts flopping around like a wet noodle.
The N64 used optical sensors in its joysticks. If you take apart the N64 joystick you'll see the joystick is attached to some disks with slits in them. The N64 had an optical sensor that would count how many slits passed by.
It would be 100% possible for game devs to include an option to mitigate drift (require the stick to be pushed at least ~x% to move at all, adjustable anywhere from 10 for slight drift to 50 for extreme cases). Haven't seen the slightest effort nor heard a peep on that.
Bunch of people in the replies seemingly never tried to play puzzle games with drift and have no idea how much trouble it can cause. Do the puzzles in The Last Campfire with joycon drift and let me know how it goes.
Wouldn't solve it, drift can affect regular joystick operation as well, where pushing it all the way to the side could show up as it being stuck in the middle.