Nintendo recently announced a batch of Black Friday deals, all of which run through November 30th. This includes a steep discount on the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, which drops it to an all-time low of $49.99 ($20 off) at Best Buy, GameStop, and Target. This is one of the more notable Black Friday discounts from Nintendo this year — that is, aside from the current promo on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Nintendo’s latest Switch OLED bundle — namely because the Pro Controller rarely goes on sale, even today.
Although there are many great third-party gamepads available, the Switch Pro Controller remains the best all-around controller for Nintendo’s aging console. It’s much more comfortable to use a full-size controller than a pair of Joy-Cons for extended hours, and its larger sticks are far more accurate. It also features a proper D-pad instead of four individual buttons and parity with Nintendo’s Joy-Con controllers, meaning you get gyro controls, HD rumble, and Amiibo support.
Other controllers, like Gulikit’s King Kong series, have some of these features and one-up the Pro Controller with drift-free Hall effect sticks and some customizability. However, they don’t provide quite the same foolproof, plug-and-play experience as Nintendo’s gamepad, which you can hand to a child and know everything will work.
While Nintendo recently came out to announce that its next console will be backward-compatible with Switch games, it hasn’t said what that means for accessories like the Pro Controller. There’s a chance that it will not be 100 percent compatible with the successor to the Switch, but since it uses an open protocol like Bluetooth, there’s really no reason it shouldn’t. That is, unless Nintendo drastically changes something with its wireless controller setup or really wants us to purchase new controllers. (Fingers crossed it doesn’t come to that.)