The ps5 controller, just like the PS4 controller, are succumbed to the dreaded stick drifting issue. I play Call of Duty and this stick drifting issue has made me own more than 4-5 controllers for each generation. At this point I have a conspiracy theory that Sony intentionally not fixing this. My friends in the Xbox camp say they never experienced this issue.
What makes this situation even more frustrating is that analog sticks have been around for a long time now. I still have controllers from the PS2/GC/Xbox era that work just fine after all these years and countless hours of play, and have no drift whatsoever.
Even the earliest analog sticks like the N64 (Which used LEDs for tracking) didn't suffer from drift — although it did wear out considerably mechanically!
I just bit the bullet and replaced my Joycon's sticks with 3rd party hall-sensing ones, which have worked great so far.
Even more frustrating, its not even that difficult to fix. All they need to do is implement a renormalization routine.
If you find your controller is drifting, then the console just needs some menu where you put the stick to a bunch of reference locations, and then the stick maps outs its own response and renormalizes. "This is neutral." "This is upper-left as far as it goes." "This is..." ect... Maybe even with fine grain mapping adjust if the player really wants control over drifting behavior.
I also have had stick drift due to COD and in the menu you can doing something similar to this by controlling how much default stick is pushed.
You set high sensitivity and the cursor moves with hand off the controller in a certain direction. You adjust the counter-drift until the cursor doesn't move at all.
Yeah, the same problem exists on the Switch. The console manufacturers should have switched to more expensive Hall effect sticks, which are not affected by this problem. I think the XBox controller also doesn't have them, but maybe they use simply higher quality parts here.
I'm pretty sure all the manufacturers have this problem pretty much equally, at least on their "normal" controllers. Nintendo worse probably just due to the very constrained available size.
You see users of all the consoles anecdotally reporting drift problems. I haven't experienced personally any drift on my PS4 or PS5 controllers, nor an Xbox controller used for a PC. I did have it happen pretty significantly on a Switch Lite.
I also think there's probably an aspect of personal usage patterns: maybe if you're just going through sticks constantly, you apply more pressure, or just use them more, or have something like a dusty environment wearing them out faster.
Never experienced this on modern Xbox controllers, but I did get it significantly on N64. Seems like it should be fixed if they use hall sensors or encoders but I haven’t actually looked inside one.
Here's an interesting video I just watched of someone making a hardware mod for existing controllers using a rotary encoder hall effect position sensor.
It might be a coincidence, but I bought the DualSense Edge and while I think it's overpriced, the sticks seem much more precise. Does anyone know if the Edge is using hall effect sticks? At more than double the price of the regular controller, I'd hope they're using higher end sticks. That said, at least they can be replaced easily and relatively cheaply ($20) on the Edge.
This issues affects all analog sticks not using hall effect ones. You can easily find examples of this hitting Xbox players too. There was even a class action lawsuit for Xbox controllers about it
