Steam Deck stick drift is just a firmware issue says Valve

Early adopters of the Valve Steam Deck have reported issues with thumbstick drift. Various users have raised problems with stick drift, a notorious issue that’s plagued the Nintendo Switch for ages.

That same issue now appears to be on the new handheld console too. At least on the right stick anyway. Not ideal news for those thinking about buying the Steam Deck. 

How to see which games will work with your Steam Deck

However, Valve no doubt worked hard to prevent such an issue from being hardware-based. In fact in the middle of last year, Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat spoke to IGN about how the company was working to avoid the problem:

“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…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.”

Since then Valve has also revealed that it is partnering with iFixit to offer officially authorised replacement parts for the Steam Deck. So if the hardware is a problem then it can be replaced. 

The good news is that the problem isn’t the hardware (at least not currently). Valve designer Lawrence Yang took to Twitter to spread the news:

Hi all, a quick note about Steam Deck thumbsticks. The team has looked into the reported issues and it turns out it was a deadzone regression from a recent firmware update. We just shipped a fix to address the bug, so make sure you’re up to date.

— Lawrence Yang (@lawrenceyang) March 2, 2022

Seemingly the issue is merely firmware-based and an update has already been pushed to deal with the problem. So be sure to grab the update if you’re having issues.