💰 Nintendo has been fined $40 million by the French equivalent of the FTC
🫠 The authority says the fine is for misleading users over issues with stick drift in Switch Joy-Con controllers
🤔 As per the DGCCRF, Nintendo failed to acknowledge the problem when it first occurred, leading to accusations of deceptive business practices between 2018 and 2023
🆓 Nintendo has been offering free repairs for affected users since 2019
Nintendo has found itself in some expensive hot water, as the Japanese firm has been fined $40 million by French authorities over faulty Joy-Con controllers suffering from stick drift.
The French equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission, the Direction Générale de la Concurrence, de la Consommation et de la Répression des Fraudes or DGCCRF for short, hit Nintendo of Europe with a 35 million Euro fine, or more than $40 million.
The authority says the fine is for misleading consumers over issues with stick drift users have found in Switch Joy-Con. Nintendo of Europe has agreed to pay the fine.
This isn’t the first time Nintendo has been found at fault over Joy-Con stick drift. After the original console’s release in 2017, users found that after years of wear and tear, the Joy-Con thumbsticks would register inputs without users even touching the controller. This issue became so widespread that it led to class action lawsuits and investigations, and brought stick drift to the fore as an issue with more traditional game controllers.
As a result, we’ve seen lots of game controller manufacturers move away from potentiometer-based mechanisms to Hall effect or TMR joysticks, like those found on Valve’s new Steam Controller and the GameSir G7 Pro 8K PC which eschew a physical mechanism entirely and eliminate the issue of stick drift once and for all.
With this in mind, the DGCCRF’s latest fine for Nintendo is over the brand’s handling of the situation. According to the body, Nintendo only acknowledged the stick drift issue in 2020, instead of when it first learned of the problem. This has led the DGCCRF to accuse Nintendo of committing deceptive business practices between 2018 and 2023.
Along with the fine, Nintendo has to put a notice of deceptive business practices on the homepage of its French website, as per the parameters of the DGCCRF’s punishment.
Nintendo has been offering free repairs of Joy-Con controllers on the original Switch for affected customers since 2019. The Nintendo Switch 2, for now, seems to have fixed the stick drift problem, but it’s still early days.
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Reece Bithrey is a journalist with bylines for Trusted Reviews, Digital Foundry, PC Gamer, TechRadar and more. He also has his own blog, UNTITLED, and graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in International History and Politics in 2023.