LÖVE

I'm not familiar with the driver situation for that type of joystick. Do you have the best / most up-to-date drivers and software possible? http://www.madcatz.com/downloads/

If you do and it still doesn't work, you could report the issue on the SDL bug tracker and see if it's a fixable problem: https://bugzilla.libsdl.org/buglist.cgi ... st_id=5497

Just confirmed, all drivers are up to date (just updating xbox controller drivers as suggested here).

Here are some of the examples of people having trouble with Big Picture and these Madcatz sticks (although they have no problem with games themselves):
link1
link2

does LOVE use the most up to date SDL? I see 2.0.1 is the most recent stable release here

edit:
nvm, LOVE uses 2.0.1
I added a bug to bugzilla