A United States law firm filed a class action lawsuit against Sony for alleged diversion of the PlayStation 5 DualSense.
This week, Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith (CSK & D), the company behind the ongoing class action lawsuit against Nintendo over the Joy-Con diversion, asked affected customers to contact them via an online form. .
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Clearly, this call to action worked. The DualSense lawsuit has now been filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of an author named Lmarc Turner, of Virginia, and other affected customers in the United States against Sony Corporation of America and Sony Interactive Entertainment.
The complaint, filed on February 12 and seen by Eurogamer, states that DualSense is “defective”.
“Specifically, the DualSense controllers used to operate the PS5 contain a defect that results in characters or gameplay moving on the screen without user command or manual joystick operation.
“This defect significantly interferes with gameplay and therefore compromises the core functionality of the DualSense controller.”
The complaint cites several online reports of DualSense drift on reddit and social media, including the tweet below that includes an apparent drift clip during the Rogue Company game:
The gyroscope on PS5 is a very marked improvement over DS4, but … He wants to deviate randomly from that. Just enough to completely miss the initial shot. # PS5Share, #RogueCompany pic.twitter.com/UiNjzBJz3W
– Nalverus (@Nalverus) February 5, 2021
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The complaint goes on to accuse Sony of being aware of this alleged DualSense diversion through online consumer complaints, says the company has equipped DualSense with “virtually the same analog components” as the PlayStation 4’s DualShock 4, which allegedly also suffered from diversion , and that the repair options are “slim”.
“Customers are experiencing long waiting times and having to deal with a maze of pre-recorded phone prompts before finally talking to an agent about repairs to bypass the DualSense controller,” says the complaint, which points out that customers must pay by sending the controller to a Sony Repair Center, even for warranty repairs.
Turner is said to have purchased a PS5 on February 5, 2021 and experienced DualSense drift on the same day. He contacted Sony customer service and was advised to restart the console, which did not work. Turner ended up buying another DualSense controller at a price of $ 69.99 a few days later.
“If the Claimant had been aware of the deviation defect before purchasing his PS5, otherwise he would not have purchased the PS5, or would have paid substantially less for it,” says the complaint.
The complaint states that Turner agreed to Sony’s PlayStation terms of service and user agreement on setting up his PS5, but wrote to Sony expressing his intention to choose not to resolve any disputes with the company through individual arbitration.
This is an important point in the context of the ongoing CSK & D case against Nintendo about the Joy-Con diversion. CSK & D filed a class action lawsuit against Nintendo of America in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington in 2019 over Joy-Con’s diversion after a similar call for affected customers to contact. The Court forced the case to arbitrate, although it refused to reject the case. CSK & D says it is currently working to bring the case to the arbitration process. Clearly, he hopes to avoid following this path with the DualSense case.
The denunciation requires a jury trial, with the plaintiff seeking monetary compensation “for damages suffered, declaratory protection and public protection”. Sony hasn’t commented yet.
Dualsense Drift from r / PS5
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Controller diversion has become a significant problem in recent years. There is an ongoing class action lawsuit against Microsoft for “stick drift” on Xbox One controllers, which also includes specific reference to the company’s latest Elite controller, the Elite Series 2.
And in January 2021, the European Commission confirmed plans to consider potential action against Nintendo over the diversion of Joy-Con, prompted by calls for it to act from its own European Consumer Organization (BEUC), which received more than 25,000 complaints from various countries.