What Are Hall Effect Joysticks, And Can They Improve Your Gaming Experience?

For the last few generations of video game consoles, one of the mortal enemies of the comfortable, consistent gaming experience has been stick drift. Whether it's your Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons, your PS5 DualSense, or your Xbox controller, every major kind of controller is susceptible to drift in the joysticks, messing up your inputs and peppering the stick's radius with dead zones. While the gaming community at large has been researching DIY solutions for this infernal problem for years, more often than not, there is no practical solution beyond getting a new (sometimes expensive) controller.

Before you purchase your next game controller, however, you may want to consider investing in a particular kind — one with a specific feature designed to defend against the endless scourge of drifting joysticks: Hall effect joysticks. While these alternate joysticks are only slightly different from the usual kind, mechanically speaking, they might just be the solution you're looking for.

A traditional controller joystick is built around an electrical component called a potentiometer. Basically, when you nudge the stick in a particular direction, the internal bit rubs up against an electric strip, generating a charge. The position and intensity of that charge are parsed by a connected device to indicate where on the stick you're pushing and how far. The problem with this setup is that the components can gradually wear out, get nudged out of alignment, or be blocked by debris, creating electrical hiccups and dead zones that lead to stick drift.

In contrast, a Hall effect stick, named after an electromagnetic phenomenon coined by physicist Edwin Herbert Hall in 1879, has no physical contact whatsoever. Rather, your inputs are generated by a combination of electrical conductors and magnets. The field generated by the internal magnets creates a voltage difference when the stick's conductor passes by them. That voltage difference can be measured and parsed as stick inputs and noticeably more precise stick inputs at that.

Because Hall effect sticks utilize magnetic fields for input detection rather than a physical connection, there is substantially less risk of internal parts wearing out. No matter how hard or fast you rock the stick around, it's never making physical contact with any other components, which means no wear-induced hardware problems. Of course, no piece of technology is completely invulnerable. 

As with anything else, if you use a single controller for a long enough time, its components will start to wear out from simple wear and tear, which could lead to stick drift. However, with Hall effect joysticks, not only does it take far longer for this wear-out to occur than with a regular stick, but any drifting you experience should be much less pronounced, especially since clogging debris is no longer a factor. If you do experience any problems, you might be able to fix them with a simple recalibration or dead zone configuration.

Currently, none of the first-party players of the game console scene make their controllers with Hall effect joysticks. This was why a few years ago if you wanted your controller to have Hall effect sticks, you'd need to disassemble the whole thing and install them yourself, which is both risky and time-consuming. Thankfully, this is not the only way to get Hall effect sticks anymore.

Multiple third-party controller manufacturers have been rolling out controllers with built-in Hall effect sticks over the last year or so. There are third-party controllers with this feature available for most major consoles and frameworks, including GameSir's Xbox controller, Gulikit's Switch Pro controller, and TERIOS' PlayStation controller. The only exception, unfortunately, are the Switch Joy-Cons, though Gulikit does still sell standalone Hall effect sticks that can be implemented into Joy-Cons with some tinkering.

Hopefully, the major manufacturers will start implementing Hall effect sticks into their default designs in the near future, but until then, there are plenty of options available to finally banish the specter of stick drift from your life.