A recent lawsuit has been filed against Sony over the alleged PlayStation 5 DualSense drift. This is not the first suit of its kind, however, this is the first one concerning the PlayStation 5. There is an ongoing class-action lawsuit against Nintendo for their Joy-Con drift issues which is currently in arbitration, but the European Commission is considering further investigation into this issue. There is also another one against Microsoft over “stick drift” on their Xbox One controllers.
The same firm behind the Nintendo class-action lawsuit, Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith, asked for anyone affected to submit their complaints in an online form. They apparently received enough information and formally filed a class-action suit on Friday, the 12 of February, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against Sony Corporation of America and Sony Interactive Entertainment.
The suit claims that the DualSense controllers the PlayStation 5 uses are defective which “results in characters or gameplay moving on the screen without user command or manual operation of the joystick.” It cites many complaints about the DualSense drift on Reddit and other social media platforms, as well as the Kotaku report that released last week which detailed the drifting issues. The suit also claims that Sony has been made aware of this issue through customer complaints and pre-release testing, and accuses them of failing to disclose this information to the consumers. Consumers have had to experience long wait times when calling customer support and have had to pay shipping costs for in-warranty repairs. The suit demands a jury trial and that the Plaintiff “seeks monetary relief for damages suffered, declaratory relief, and public injunctive relief” as they claim that this issue would have dissuaded customers from paying for the PlayStation 5 at full price.
Sony has yet to comment on this lawsuit or the DualSense drift issues as of yet.