Nintendo has received thousands of faulty Joy-Cons every week; problems such as drifting have overwhelmed a repair facility in the US.

The drifting Joy-Con has long plagued Nintendo – a bug that causes the analogues to not respond appropriately to movement, and your character moves around the game without touching anything. This is undoubtedly a significant pitfall for a console that is already one of the company’s most successful products.

The shortcomings of the Joy-Con have prompted an official apology from the Kyoto-based company, as well as several lawsuits.

However, the situation inside the repair shops seems to have been much more chaotic than described by a former plant manager of one of the outsourced repair companies in an interview with Kotaku.

Although Nintendo managed the process, United Radio carried out the repairs. The company’s former plant manager reported a “very stressful” volume of faulty controllers: “We could easily have thousands of Joy-Cons coming in every week,” he said, leading United Radio to set up a whole new workspace dedicated exclusively to Joy-Con repairs.

The Joy-Con repair company had to dedicate a separate room to Joy-Con repairs.

As explained by Kotaku’s source, due to high saturation, many malfunctions occurred during the process. According to reports, between 2017 and 2018, customers received replacement Joy-Cons, but the policy changed, and the repair shop staff repaired all incoming units. The report also points out that 90 per cent of the units had to be fixed within four days, which, as the former supervisor explained, was “difficult to comply with”. In its report, Kotaku points to problems with a lack of management experience within the team, which they attribute to a high turnover of Aerotek’s temporary staff.

Source: Kotaku