Amazon asked Nintendo to break the law, says Reggie Fils-Aimé

During the era of the original Nintendo DS, the company made a bold decision to cut ties with Amazon. In a recent lecture at NYU, former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé revealed the reasoning behind that move: Amazon had allegedly requested special treatment that would have not only damaged Nintendo’s standing with other retailers but potentially violated the law.

The two companies have since reconciled, and the upcoming Switch 2 is available for preorder on Amazon. However, for years, Nintendo’s hardware was conspicuously absent from the e-commerce giant’s catalog. In the early 2000s, Amazon was aggressively expanding beyond books and trying to beat competitors on price. According to Fils-Aimé, the company sought to undercut even Walmart and demanded what he described as an “obscene amount of support, financial support.”

Though he did not specify the exact nature of the financial backing Amazon was after, Fils-Aimé recalled telling the Amazon executive directly, “You know that’s illegal, right? I can’t do that.” He explained that this moment was a key reason Nintendo ended its partnership with the retailer. “Literally, we stopped selling to Amazon, and it’s because I wasn’t going to do something illegal. I wasn’t going to do something that would put at risk the relationship we have with other retailers,” he said. “But it also set the stage to say, look, you’re not going to push me around. This is the way we do business. And so that’s how, over time, you build respect.”