A Quebecois woman has filed a lawsuit against Nintendo over Joy-Con drift. The lawsuit joins a number of others pursuing action against Nintendo over faulty hardware, with many consumers' Joy-Con controllers seemingly developing this fault.
What is this new Joy-Con lawsuit about?
This story comes to us from Quebec news platform TVA Nouvelles (we're using machine translation for the link). According to plaintiff Kelly-Ann St-Laurent, she experienced Joy-Con drift - a mechanical fault causing characters or the camera to move by themselves - on four separate Joy-Con controllers. The problem recurred on menu screens and in every game she played, leading her to describe playing her Switch as "impossible".
Ms. St-Laurent's lawyer Jimmy Lambert describes Joy-Con drift as "a hidden defect or programmed obsolescence". He points out that Quebec's Consumer Protection Act requires products to have what he describes as a "reasonable" lifespan. Speaking to TVA Nouvelles, Lambert compared having to replace Joy-Con controllers to "having to change your TV remote every seven to twelve months" at considerable personal cost. Ms. St-Laurent sent her first defective controller to Vancouver, waiting a month for it to be repaired. Three months later, the other half of the same Joy-Con pair began to malfunction. In total, Ms. St-Laurent says she spent more than the console cost her on controllers.
Nintendo's troubled Joy-Con lawsuit history
This is far from the first encounter with lawsuits Nintendo has had over Joy-Con drift. There are a number of other lawsuits in progress against the Japanese gaming giant from the US and France, among other places. Nintendo has won the occasional victory, such as when a federal judge ordered one of its Joy-Con lawsuits to go to arbitration. With the advent of this new Quebecois lawsuit, however, it seems Nintendo's woes when it comes to Joy-Con controllers are far from over.
In the motion filed by Ms. St-Laurent and her lawyer, they say they are seeking punitive damages for everyone who purchased a Switch console in Quebec. In addition, the lawsuit requests that Nintendo awards a compensatory amount of money to each consumer who has suffered with a defective product. We'll bring you more on this, including the progress of this lawsuit, as soon as we get it.
What do you think of this lawsuit? Do you have defective Joy-Con controllers? Let us know in the comments below!
