President of Nintendo Apologizes for Defective Drifting Joy-Cons- But is that enough?

Photo Credit: Arca Baran for This and That, Here and There

The president of Nintendo, Shuntaro Furukawa, apologized for the Joy-Con drift issue in a recent meeting with investors. This is what he had to say during a Q&A session, translated from Japanese by Kotaku (https://kotaku.com/nintendo-president-apologizes-for-joy-con-trouble-1844216184) from this source: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2020/qa2006.pdf 

"Regarding the Joy-Con, we apologize for any trouble caused to our customers... We are continuing to aim to improve our products, but as the Joy-Con is the subject of a class-action lawsuit in the United States and this is still a pending issue, we would like to refrain from responding about any specific actions."

So basically, this starts out with basically what Nintendo would reply with when asked for comment about the issue by various publications last July when a major sudden public outrage occurred over the topic, which has been prevalent since near the launch of the Switch back in March of 2017. The fact it took this long to get an official statement of any kind on the topic was already strange. Now, it has taken more than 3 years for the president of Nintendo to say anything to investors about it. I'm no expert in business at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that when you talk to investors about your company, you're supposed to address issues and alleviate concerns about the state of your company to convince investors to, well, invest. 

Then, the mysterious "aim to improve our products" phrase is reused. Does this mean that they are finally working behind-the-scenes to reverse-engineer the source of the problem (which several ordinary Joes on the Internet may have already figured out, anyway) and to release a new revised batch of Joy-Con controllers? Would they then give this new batch for free to those who had encountered the issue previously? Of course, they remained vague. Why? Because as I wrote about before on this blog (http://www.arcabaran.com/2019/07/ttht-news-roundup-july-switch-drift-finalfest-apollo.html), in the U.S. a lawsuit had emerged on the basis of the Joy-Con violating several consumer protection laws. Which makes sense, and absolutely was necessary in order to make any progress to stop Nintendo from charging $80 a pair for defective products. That practice appears ridiculously anti-consumer and greedy for a company that, usually when it comes to games and even their hardware, has a sky-high reputation. 

Due to the lawsuit, they are restrained from talking any much more specifics about if they're working on fixing it or not (I think, and hope, that they would want to do so). Only once the lawsuit is settled, will we probably find out anything for certain as to what will happen. 

Anyways, that's it for this post. I will continue making daily posts all throughout this month and hopefully next month, as well, during my summer "quarancation" (still a summer vacation, since my school is off). Be sure to read my previous post, detailing my blogging plans and talking about my thoughts on stuff that has been happening recently that I might write about: http://www.arcabaran.com/2020/07/my-summer-2020-blogging-plan.html

Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwRZe3oXRb7ybJthjNfoz5w), where I will hopefully be uploading multiple edited full-length vacation vlogs of footage that has been sitting around for a few years. To get an idea of what that's like, check out my full collection of Dominican Republic vlogs using footage from 2018 that I finally edited and uploaded over spring break: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqv99ToFqgJ9FeKXqNAWnEMIAY0Faskg2 

Until next time, this is Arca, signing off. Stay safe.