Valve’s Steam Deck has been built to avoid joystick drift

Valve has confirmed the Steam Deck shouldn’t suffer from the joystick drift issue that has plagued consoles in recent years.

In an interview with IGN, a group of developers and engineers working for Valve confirmed that the issue of drift has been a focus when creating the Steam Deck’s hardware.

Issues with joystick drift have become more common in recent years, with the Nintendo Switch famously promising free fixes for its JoyCon issues, and Sony’s PlayStation 5 console coming under fire for using the same flawed hardware.

With this in mind, Valve has focused on the reliability of their new handheld console, which is due for release in December of this year. In the interview, the team said they believed customers would be “super happy” with the performance of the Steam Deck.

“We’ve done a ton of testing on reliability, on all fronts really – and all inputs and different environmental factors and all that kind of stuff,” explained hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat.

“I think we feel that this will perform really well. And I think people will be super happy with it. I think that it’s going to be a great buy. I mean, obviously every part will fail at some point, but we think people will be very satisfied and happy with this.”

With recent news that some of Steam’s most popular games may not run on the Steam Deck due to anti-cheat software, Valve may have more issues to iron out before the console is released.

However, the Steam Deck is already proving a popular choice, with scalpers already charging almost double for reservations on eBay. Preorders for the console went live on Friday at 6 PM BST, but the demand for the Steam Deck quickly proved too much for Steam’s servers, which crashed.

In a recent interview, Valve president Gabe Newell said the company needed to be “very aggressive” in terms of pricing the Steam Deck, citing price performance as “one of the critical factors in the mobile space”.

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