While Nintendo shared a lot about the hardware for Switch 2 during its April 2 Direct and subsequent Treehouse streams, the company still won’t share the exact workings of the second iteration of Joy-Con or Pro Controller directional inputs. Specifically, it won’t confirm if the new sticks will use Hall effect technology, which has been highly rumored, and would help combat the Joy-Con drift that plagued the original system.

Nintendo’s hardware developers, featured in the Nintendo Direct, were first asked this question during a large press briefing with over a hundred outlets on Wednesday, April 2. A reporter from TechRadar asked if stick drift had been improved with the Joy-Con 2 and Pro Controller 2.

“As you may have witnessed and felt, the new Joy-Con 2 controllers for the Nintendo Switch 2 have been really designed from the ground up from scratch and they’ve been designed to have bigger movements and also a smoother movement,” said Tetsuya Sasaki, general manager of Nintendo’s hardware development division, to the crowd via translator. He offered no additional follow-up, only asking the reporters assembled if they could feel the difference.

Polygon followed up in a translated interview with Nintendo’s hardware team the next day, asking if the Joy-Con would use magnets, which are a key component in Hall effect joysticks, so the sticks would have less wear and tear over time.

“It is true that we’ve rebuilt those as well from the ground up,” Sasaki reiterated. “We haven’t shared what the inner mechanisms are of those control sticks, and if I were to dive into it, it would basically be sharing the whole blueprint of the control stick. So it is a difficult question to answer.”

VGC got a slightly better answer, but one that doesn’t provide much clarity either. “The control sticks for Joy-Con 2 controllers have been redesigned and have improved in areas such as durability,” a Nintendo spokesperson told the outlet.

But this is actually a topic players deserve an answer to. Polygon’s staff have shared plenty of their own first-hand frustrations with Joy-Con drift, which usually causes whatever is being controlled to drift to the left, even if there’s no one touching the controller.

Hall-effect joysticks could solve this problem, as they utilize magnets and magnetic fields to register inputs, rather than physical contacts that could wear away over time. (My colleague Michael McWhertor wrote an excellent explainer on Hall effect’s importance, with interviews from experts at iFixit, so please check that out for further reading.)

And Joy-Con drift has given Nintendo somewhat of a PR black eye, as it was hit with multiple class-action lawsuits over the issue in the U.S., though all have been dismissed. It also lead Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa to apologize in a shareholder Q&A, saying “ we apologize for any trouble caused to our customers.”

It’s possible we won’t get an answer on Joy-Con 2’s internal workings until after the Switch 2 launches on June 5, and folks can start the teardown efforts widely.

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