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Console reliability from your own experience

Joined
Oct 14, 2013
Location
Australia
The fact that Nintendo have offered free repairs is an admission of guilt and evidence enough that this is an issue far more widespread that your typical tech fault. A good start is simply looking at Nintendo's support website and seeing that 2 of the 6 trending articles are joycon drift related.
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/
This is just PR. Sometimes the damages due to bad PR outweigh the cost to fix the few people who have an issue so they just do it.

Nintendo have not published any official numbers themselves
Nintendo need to, as the number of sticks repaired is probably the only way we'll know exactly how many people have the issue . . . and took advantage of the offer to get it fixed.

Of the 26,000 that responded, 9774 reported drift. That's 48% of people who answered the survey on that site alone and nearly half your proposed number of 20k already
Assuminy not a single person is on the bandwagon here and actually has the issue (which I don't agree with) then it's a sizable number. We also don't know what their % defective tolerances their manufacturing proceses have. What we do know is the sticks are very easy to replace. Anyone with a little teardown knowledge could do it. Maybe Nintendo thought "if this part has issues, it's a low cost/low time fix"

On Nintendolife.com, out of 1874 votes, 24% reported moderate to severe drift issues[/quote]
Can you prove 100% that every single one of the people who said yes to those surveys actually have the issue and are not just jumping on the badwagon.

By comparison, this website states that back in 2013 when the PS4 launched Sony themselves viewed 0.4% as an acceptable defect rate for their units as a whole. Not a single component, but the entire bundle. And even then, they weren't supported in their claims that this was an acceptable level of fault by the market as a whole.
I remember this. People knew this but still bought more PS4s. We all know the best way to make a company listen is to stop buying their products. Hitting their bottom dollar really works. Thinking a product is no good, because it has a too high chance of being faulty from the factory . . . but still buying the product in record numbers . . . what does that say about the public?

This article does pick up on the idea that the rise of social media has made it easier for complaints to be heard by the public, and this is very true.
We can quibble over number and how major or minor the issue is till the cows come home. The important take away here is exactly what you said here. Social media gives people a visible platform to pass these issues on to the developers and manufacturers. Every issue should be treated equally and should be fixed, regardless of how many people are affected by it.

Ideally the fix would happen because the company wants to see the best product. If it's to avoid a PR disaster or becase of a court order, that's nice but it does nothing to change the culture of these companies. They are a business first but we need to keep reminding them (via smart purchases) that only good PR will keep us as repeat customers. If they ignore our issues, we should stop buying their products.
It's when the public know about issues but still buy the product in record numbers, that does nothing as it only pushes complacency. The company then feels they get sales no matter now good or bad their product is.

I think the simple say of saying it in a nutshell is - "A company has no want to fix a lemon of a product if people keep buying it."
We as consumers are not using the power we have as consumers very well here at all.
 

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