How to fix control stick drift on Steam Deck

Despite promising last year that the Steam Deck wouldn’t suffer from the kind of joystick drift that has plagued the Nintendo Switch since its launch, it looks like a little bug slipped into the release of the highly anticipated console. When users on Reddit started posting videos of their consoles exhibiting the fault, fans were concerned that this would be a difficult issue to fix. Because the controllers are built into the console, replacing them would be far more complex and expensive.

Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case with the Steam Deck’s drift problem. The problem has actually been a calibration issue introduced in a late-stage update to the system. The glitch caused the joy stick’s dead zone, which is where no input is detected by the controller, to be too small, causing the cursor to wander.

While there are some unofficial fixes for this problem floating around on Reddit, Valve has already offered up an official fix. If you’re experiencing joystick drift on your Steam Deck, a firmware update is available from Valve that should fix it. According to one of the designers of the console on Twitter, users just need to update the console, and it should fix the problem.