Valve releases fix for joystick drift on Steam Deck

The Steam Deck has recently become available and soon there were reports of stick drift issues with the handheld’s joysticks. Valve says it has released a fix for this in the form of a firmware update.

Lawrence Yang, a designer at Valve, says on Twitter that a team has looked at the reported issues. Based on this, it would have been concluded that it was a deadzone regression with a recent firmware update. So it is a calibration problem. The company behind the Steam Deck has now released a fix for this.

With stick drift problems, the user experiences that his character in the game or the cursor starts to move in a certain direction, without actually touching the joystick. This problem is more common on consoles. It is best known from the Nintendo Switch where the drift can occur with the Joy-Con joysticks, but it is also reported, for example, with the DualSense controller of the PlayStation 5.

It’s not entirely clear how widespread the problem is with the Steam Deck. Several reports have been made on Reddit, among others. For example, another user posted a video on YouTube about the effect of the new update that Valve has released. According to this user, the drift problem seems to have been solved, but now it seems to be more difficult to do very small inputs. This could possibly be the result of a somewhat larger deadzone for the joysticks.

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