YouTuber Claims To Have A Permanent Fix For Joy-Con Drift

A YouTuber named Victorstk says that he's fixed his Joy-Con drift permanently, and now you can too. In a lengthy video, Victorstk (also known as VK) discusses many of the suspected causes for the joystick drift that has impacted the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers on a massive scale, noting that his alleged fix is the only one that seems to work permanently.

While VK's video is well put-together, as usual with these sort of claims, it's best to regard them with a grain of salt, or perhaps a spoonful. Still, VK's fix--which is placing a 1 mm piece of paper or card stock on top of one area of the Joy-Con after taking it apart--is substantially less invasive than sending the Joy-Con to Nintendo, or attempting to replace the stick yourself.

VK's analysis concludes that the Joy-Con drift is caused by the metal casing that holds the stick slowly loosening over time due to use, which makes the metal prongs lose contact with the graphite pads that detect the input.

He suggests that Nintendo could fix the problem by introducing a screw that could hold the metal plates together with the plastic parts of the stick. VK says the pressure of the card stock has solved the problem permanently for him. Both of his Joy-Cons suffered from stick drift, and after the card fix, they haven't drifted in two months of use.

Joy-Con drift is such a substantial problem that Nintendo's president Shuntaro Furukawa apologized for it back in 2020, and there are multiple lawsuits pending about the phenomenon in US courts. Some Switch owners were disappointed to learn that the new OLED model of the console will feature the same Joy-Cons as the base model earlier this month. Nintendo does fix the issue for free, but that of course requires you to send your precious Joy-Cons to them in order to implement it.