Sony faces lawsuit over alleged PS5 controller defect

Sony’s PlayStation 5 has been very popular since its launch last fall, but not all customers who managed to buy one are satisfied.

Recently, one such customer, namely Turner, filed a lawsuit accusing Sony of violating the warranty agreement after experiencing defects in the PS5 DualSense wireless controllers.

The filing comes soon after a law firm, Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith, set up a web page soliciting reports of issues with the controller.

The class action suit alleges that the DualSense controllers released in November along with the new PS5 console suffer from a defect known as “drift”. It means that the game characters or other elements on screen move without the user actually operating the joystick.

“This defect significantly interferes with gameplay and thus compromises the DualSense controller’s core functionality,” the complainant says.

While Sony has not yet commented on the lawsuit, the complainant claims that he has been experiencing drift issue since the day he purchased PS5 in early February.

Turner says he contacted customer service and followed their troubleshooting instructions.

Given that his experience with contacting Sony did not satisfactorily addressed the issue, Turner opted to purchase another DualSense controller for $69.99.

“If I had been aware of the defect prior to purchasing PS5, I would not have purchased it, or would have paid substantially less for it.”

The suit also alleges that Sony has been aware of the drift issue because of “online consumer complaints, complaints made by consumers directly to it, and through its own pre-release testing”.

One user reported the issue 10 days after receiving the PS5 console, stating that they tried every possible fix, like power-cycling the console, turning Bluetooth on and off, resetting the controller, and charging it fully overnight, but nothing worked.

The suit alleges that customers seeking help with their devices have run into a backlog on Sony’s dedicated portal for issues with PS5 hardware, and face long wait times to speak with customer service agents.

It claims that when consumers return the controllers for in-warranty repairs related to drift, they “have to pay for shipping the controller to a Sony repair center, and Sony does not reimburse customers for these shipping costs.”

“Recent software and firmware updates did not ameliorate or address the defect in any way,” says the complaint.

The lawsuit seeks to make Sony implement a recall or free replacement programme to address the issue for all class members, in addition to other relief such as damage payments to compensate consumers for out of pocket expenses to fix the alleged defect.

Sony said earlier this month that it sold 4.5 million units of PS5 hardware between its launch and December 31.