When you first pick up the DualSense Controller of the PS5, it becomes clear how important this little piece of hardware is for the overall experience. Thus, when you begin to feel something going very wrong with it, it’s more than enough to get you worried. Even if this thing didn’t cost R1,500, just knowing that your shiny new next-gen controller is experiencing the dreaded drift is rather distressing.

You’ve probably heard of controller drift in the past. It’s been a problem for a while now, most commonly occurring in Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Cons. Controller drift occurs when there’s a malfunction in the analogue sticks, resulting in the controller detecting inputs from the user even when it isn’t being touched. It obviously makes controlling the game harder at best and impossible at worse. Now it seems like the problem has migrated to Sony’s PS5.

Users have begun to share stories of their DualSense drift problems, with some folks even claiming their controllers were drifting just ten days after the console launched in November. If you are one of the unfortunate few that experience drift, then the avenues to fix the problem are sorely limited. You could reach out to the Sony PlayStation support webpage, but good look getting any kind of response from them timeously.

DualSense: Tokyo Drift

Kotaku took a bit of a deep dive into the process of sourcing some kind of refund or return policy for a drifting DualSense and it seems like an excessive run-around. On the plus side, it was determined that drift is covered by the PS5 warranty… but customers will need to pay to ship the controller to a Sony Repair Centre, of which there’s one in Boksburg if you’re in South Africa. Sony will pay for return shipping but still, that’s a little cheeky.

Let’s just hope that DualSense drift doesn’t become as widespread and pronounced as the dreaded Joy-Con drift that Nintendo has been fighting for several years now.