The Steam Deck is the latest piece of hardware from Valve in their never-ending quest to keep you playing the games in your Steam library at every waking moment. The kit has some impressive specs and only started shipping out to customers last week, but there have already been some hardware issues posted by these early adopters.
According to customers on the Steam Deck subreddit, there are already issues of joystick drift for the new console. While seeing hardware troubles on the console aren’t entirely unexpected, it is surprising that the issue has popped up this early in the console’s rollout. The Nintendo Switch, which continues to have drift issues with the Joy-Con controllers, usually only develops the issue after extended use. Many of these Steam Deck users seem to have had the issue straight out of the box, a problem that is exacerbated by the fact that the controllers are permanently attached to the console.
It is difficult to know how widespread this issue is from the small sample size provided by Reddit and, as of the time of this writing, Valve has not offered a solution for customers who are experiencing drift with the Steam Deck outside of their normal customer support channels.
