TL;DR: If your game controller isn’t working, it’s not your fault.
My apologies if you clicked on this post expecting to see a political discussion. It’s difficult to talk about the real topic of this essay without using the word “left”.
The actual topic? Joystick drift on a PS5 controller.
A trivial topic, to be sure. There are far better resources on the internet for this problem than this essay. The primary reason why I’m writing this post is that it’s going to affect my write-up of playthrough 11 of BG3. But I’ll save the description of the “bug-zapper disaster” for that future post, which is a software issue, and stick to the hardware issue.
I purchased my PS5 in March 2021. A couple of years later, by July 2023, I noticed a problem when playing games: The PS5 controller was sending signals that told the console that the left joystick was pressed to the left, even when I wasn’t touching the left joystick on the controller.
This got annoying enough that I bit the bullet and purchased a new controller.
It’s October 2024, a little over a year later, and the black controller is showing the same problem.
Why was I using up controllers? Was I doing something wrong in the way I handled the controller?
This time I did what I should have done a year ago: I did a web search on the problem. I discovered:
- This is a known problem with PS5 controllers.
- It’s not just the PS5 controller. All controllers on all consoles can exhibit the same symptoms.
- The root cause of the problem is in the potentiometer on one of the axes of the joystick. There’s a metal widget inside that can become worn with time.
This video goes into details and demonstrates one potential fix.
As I watched the video, my heart sank. If I were a couple of decades younger, my level of coordination would have been up to this task. Now, I was not confident that I could manipulate small metal parts with a tweezer.
Beyond that, even if I did the repair, it would only be temporary. I could replace the worn part (maybe), but the new part would eventually wear down again.
The real solution was to replace the potentiometer-based joysticks with ones based on the Hall effect.
I looked at the iFixit repair video:
Forget it. If I was concerned about manipulating tiny objects with tweezers, precision soldering was completely beyond me. I would have attempted this if I were still in my 30s, but not now.
To be fair: I never threw away that white PS5 controller. I could experiment with that and see if the process worked.
In that video, they mention you need a good soldering iron to handle the lead-free solder joints. I didn’t think my decades-old soldering iron (which you just plug in; no temperature gauge) could handle it. The cost of purchasing the tools for this repair would rapidly approach the cost of buying a new controller.
If I purchased a new controller, I’d just be buying time. Clearly the reason why the black controller did not last as long as the white controller was because I’ve been playing BG3 so much. If I wanted to continue using my PS5, I’d prefer a longer-term solution if one were available.
As I’ve often said, this blog is filled with nothing but #ZerothWorldProblems. In particular, I can solve some problems by throwing money at them.
I purchased a new controller to tide me over:
I found a site that would create a custom controller according to your specifications, including what kind of joystick mechanism you wanted:
It will take 3-5 weeks for the custom controller to be shipped, which is why I ordered a conventional controller to use in the meantime.
I felt my usual pang of guilt as I threw money at what amounts to an pricey toy to solve a #ZerothWorldProblem. I comforted myself by remembering that in the past couple of weeks I’d donated far more money than this for hurricane relief.
Is a custom controller worth the cost? I’ll let you know when I write up playthrough 11.
