Here’s something fun: Microsoft has been struggling with joystick drifting, the very same that has seen Nintendo dragged over the coals for the past years with the Nintendo Switch.
The lawsuit stems from April of 2020 with multiple users frustrated that Microsoft refuses to take action and help the affected users aside from remarking that they ought to purchase new controllers; stop us when you’ve heard this one before.
Aside from the frankly standard banalities of overpaid suits arguing about esoteric and archaic laws in courtrooms, Microsoft has attempted a new move to get the lawsuit thrown out of court by pointing to the services agreement with a motion to compel the Washington Court to agreed-upon arbitration from the Microsoft Services Agreement.
When you originally open up software or connect something to your machine, there tends to be this bizarrely long and absurd document called the EULA (end users license agreement) where companies tend to attempt to bully you into fun acts: they can and will say almost anything in there, and you have to get to the end in order to use whatever you’re trying to.
The fun fact of these is that they don’t stand up in court: they rarely do, as no one is frankly expected to read through an overly-wordy essay from a desperate law student attempting to eat anything other than ramen for a single night.
Microsoft calls on courts to move Xbox drift lawsuit away from trial by jury and into impartial arbitrationhttps://t.co/m8z89IYciX
— GamesIndustry (@GIBiz) January 4, 2021
Microsoft is pushing for arbitration to be used (an out of court system) while pointing to the Microsoft Services Agreement that users must agree to in order to use services such as Xbox Live.
These, Microsoft proposes, should instead be brought to the attention of the American Arbitration Association, an organization that (as the name betrays) specializes in third-party arbitration for conflicting entities that exist solely to ensure that the courtrooms aren’t over inundated with pointless lawsuits.
Microsoft announced in mid-October that they are extending the warranty status of the Xbox Elite Controller 2, where users that needed to have the controller repaired can be refunded the costs of said repair by Microsoft themselves.
That Microsoft has been taking steps to ensure that consumers that are experiencing the drift, allegedly due to a lubricant build-up, does admittedly take a bit of fun away from poking holes in the argument, but the end result should echo an objective across the board.
People want to be able to use the controllers that they have purchased, as they are supposed to be used. Nothing more, and nothing less.
