US law firm Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith LLP filed a class-action lawsuit against Sony following several complaints from people on social media regarding a DualSense ‘drift issues’.
The law firm had been eyeing a lawsuit against Sony for a while in their second such case after Nintendo, where the Joy-Con had experiences similar technical problems.
On February 11th, Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith LLP had launched an online class-action investigation portal. The survey would determine the likelihood of a lawsuit, and it now seems that the likelihood was overwhelmingly in the positive end of things.
The lawsuit was filed on 12th February in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of plaintiff Lmarc Turner and “similarly situated consumers,” informs GamesIndustry.
GamesIndustry sources confirmed that they had been sent a copy of the lawsuit. The document argued that the DualSense controller is defective as it suffers from a drift issue, wherein inputs are recorded even when the player is not using it. The document further said that the issue “compromises the DualSense Controller’s core functionality,” adding that online consumer complaints had made Sony aware of this flaw.
The lawsuit also directly quoted the Kotaku report which was responsible for revealing the issue in the first place and mentioned that in case of a certain player, the issue arose as recently as ten days after purchase. Saying that the repair options at this stage are “slim”, the lawsuit went on to accuse Sony of failing “to disclose this material information to consumers” inspite of being aware of the defect.
“As a result of Sony’s unfair, deceptive, and/or fraudulent business practices, owners of DualSense Controllers, including Plaintiff, have suffered an ascertainable loss, injury in fact, and otherwise have been harmed by Sony’s conduct. Accordingly, Plaintiff brings this action to redress Sony’s violations of state consumer fraud statutes, breach of warranty, and unjust enrichment. Plaintiff seeks monetary relief for damages suffered, declaratory relief, and public injunctive relief,” the lawsuit claimed.
