Law firm files Class Action Lawsuit against Sony over PS5 DualSense drift

The law firm claims that Sony's PS5 gamepad design is defective.



Read more about the PlayStation 5's DualSense drift lawsuit.

Translation, Bunch of leeches wanting lots of money from a company, Customers will get a new controller and leeches will get a few million.

Perhaps the company should've listened to consumer feedback without letting it get to class action stage then. ^

Perhaps the law firm should've made an actual effort into collecting data instead of an online random form that is easily manipulated by bots and does not hold any data that proves anything as it's not a full on statistical research paper to prove millions of controllers are affected by drift. ^


Me personally knowing probably a hundred people with a ps5. Not one person is even aware of this controller drift, until I asked about it they were clueless. Ancedotal sure but that's basically what this "law firm" did.

If this issue is specific to the analogue sticks and not any of the tilt/gyro sensors, i can think of several strategies to combat this.

I would be interested to know what transducers are being used to detect movement. Potentiometers, lasers, hall effects, ultrasonics are all potential sensing techniques that can be used to measure position. But my guess here would be that its most likely a pot, but could very well be a laser sensor of one kind or another.

If they have used potentiometers my guess is its from heating causing changes in component resistance creating zero point shift.

If you could design the mechanism well, a superior analogue input would be a high res counting wheel set up for each direction of travel. No drift, sub millimetre precision, probably too expensive and too big though.

There are numerous ways of re calibrating sensors too which could be used if a user identifies the problem and was willing to go through a couple of steps of wiggling to troubleshoot. This is probably the easiest strategy to implement but requires provision in the firmware of the controllers and the OS of the console.

With the exception of the Nintendo 64 (Which used rotary encoders) I'm fairly sure all major consoles since have used potentiometers for their analogue sticks

With the Switch you can recalibrate them partially in software, and for Xbox One controllers the potentiometers can be tuned with a screwdrivers to re-zero the pots and remove the drift, though it's still a pain to get inside.

However, with the Switch, and presumably with this DS5, there seemed to be a variety of small wear and tear issues that could lead to the defect occurring, like worn contacts or loosing mechanism, and you couldn't get rid of the drift with recalibration or similar.

A mechanism similar to a traditional joystick combined with a hall effect sensor would probably also work very well, and be less susceptible to traditional failure modes.

I'd like to see someone try but I think the cost of developing that tech into such a small package might harm feasibility. The N64's approach of using a digital rotary encoder theoretically avoids the issues of resistors environmental variability, though in that case it was a relative encoder and not an absolute one, so it zero'd to the position of the stick at power on, so if you had worn out mechanical parts and the joystick wasn't sprung correctly (Very common with original N64 controllers due to mechanical design flaws that lead to the plastic slowly grinding down, fixed by a hobbyist re-design decades later) you'd end up with drift on that too. A development on this to its extreme would be to use a rotary optical absolute encoder for each dimension, so you just read the absolute position of the stick off at any given time, and just convert the gray code to traditional binary, and bang that out as your output. You could definitely fit it in the size required, but again probably very expensive.

Although this didn't seem to be as nearly as common an issue on other consoles besides these two, definitely there but not at these kinds of reported rates, so maybe it is just a design flaw here too rather than a fundamental issue of the tech, which of course needs to be selected as a balance of its cost and practicality with standard issue controllers.

Ever heard of how the US Navy replaced their $40K periscope control systems with Xbox 360 controllers and found them as effective? https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/19/16333376/us-navy-military-xbox-360-controller

Not sure how feasible it would be to scale down, but Thrustmaster T16000m uses hall effect. It's pretty legendary in old trackmania circles for being head and shoulders above competition in terms of precision - but it's also non-linear. Latter could be corrected on dirmware level, though.

A traditional optical absolute encoder is probably overkill (I have an omron one on my desk in bits with 2^23 counts per rev) but considering the cost of flash memory and most controllers require batteries anyway. A battery backed absolute encoder would be very achievable and would last months even after the main battery had gone flat.

Small pots are only about $1 each for you and me but a linear hall sensor is about $10 so considerably more expensive to implement than a pot but not completely out of the question.

But if the root cause of failures is mechanical no amount of firmware wizardry is going to completely solve it. And improved sensing of a bad input is just garbage in garbage out.