If you’re experiencing stick drift on your Steam Deck, try this

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Valve has shipped the first batch of Steam Decks and critics have mixed reviews on the device so far. But as the Steam Deck makes its way to more people’s hands, users have discovered a new issue that is too familiar for handheld gaming devices: stick drift.

A handful of users on Reddit have started noticing stick drift in the joysticks on the Steam Deck. Stick drift is a phantom input that causes your cursor or screen to move, even when you are not moving the joystick.

Fans and owners of the Nintendo Switch console may be familiar with stick drift. In fact, Nintendo’s latest handheld console had terrible stick drift issues. The issues with the Joy-Cons got so bad that the company eventually started replacing them for free.

Experiencing stick drift on the right stick already… from SteamDeck

Fortunately, stick drift doesn’t seem to be a hardware issue in the Steam Deck. Lawrence Yang, a Steam Deck team member, told The Verge that “there was a deadzone calibration issue introduced in a recent firmware update.”

READ MORE: Steam Deck just launched but Valve is already thinking about a Steam Deck 2

Essentially, a firmware update caused a bug in the device’s software that led to this stick drift issue. As a result, the company has now sent out an update to fix the stick drift.

If you’ve noticed any stick drift issues on your own Steam Deck, make sure you have the latest updates installed. Head to Settings>System>Firmware Update to check for an update.

Hopefully, this update completely fixes any stick drift issue the device has. The last thing we want to see is permanent stick drift on the Steam Deck, especially since the devices are essentially brand new.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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