Valve is confident Steam Deck won't have stick drift issues

Stick drift on thumbsticks is a problem that has plagued the industry in recent years. With Valve about to step into the handheld market with its Steam Deck, a device that has thumbsticks, users are no doubt curious what the company has done to ensure stick drift isn’t going to be an issue. As it turns out, the problem of stick drift – and the quality of the parts overall – has been on Valve’s mind throughout the process and it’s confident the Steam Deck won’t have stick drift woes.

In an interview with IGN, hardware engineer, Yazan Aldehayyat, and Steam Deck designer, John Ikeda, shed some light on stick drift and the decision-making process for the parts based on those technical problems.

According to Aldehayyat, the team has done a significant amount of testing on reliability, with different inputs and environments. However, no amount of testing in a laboratory will be able to account for every situation in the real-world. Aldehayyat continues, “Obviously every part will fail at some point, but we think people will be very satisfied and happy with [the Steam Deck].”

It seems as if the engineers have worked hard to ensure quality parts make it into the final build. Ikeda touches on this, “We purposely picked something that we knew the performance of, right? We didn't want to take a risk on that, right? As I'm sure our customers don't want us to take a risk on that either."

At the end of the day, technology will no doubt wear down and break, but it’s good to know that Valve is working to avoid stick drift issues with its Steam Deck. It certainly wouldn’t want to find itself in the situation Nintendo faces with class action lawsuits over Joy-Con drifting. Be sure to keep it locked to Shacknews for the latest on the Steam Deck, which you can pre-order now.