At a recent NYU lecture, former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé divulged on a conversation between himself and an Amazon executive. Meeting in the late 2000s, Fils-Aimé says the e-commerce giant attempted to pressure Nintendo to not just burn relationships with other retailers, but outright break the law.
“Amazon was looking to get bigger into the video game space,” said Fils-Aimé. “Amazon’s mentality back then is they wanted to have the lowest price out in the marketplace, even lower than Walmart… Essentially what Amazon wanted (was an) obscene amount of support, financial support, so they could have the lowest price and beat Walmart. I literally said to the executive, “You know that’s illegal, right? I can’t do that.””
Nintendo and Amazon have never been on friendly terms. Last year, just as Nintendo was launching their new Switch 2, the anticipated home console was nowhere to be seen on the platform as pre-orders cropped up on competing retailers. This comes after a history of first party games being unavailable on Amazon or pre-orders being unceremoniously cancelled. Some speculated the turmoil revolved around third-party sellers and Nintendo themselves being undercut. Seems the bad blood goes back even further.
This fallout dates all the way back to the Nintendo DS era. At the time, the Wii and DS were Nintendo’s best selling hardware in history. Amazon originally sold books, but in the 2000s rapidly expanded with cheaper discounts to became a one-stop shop for almost everything. Everything except Nintendo, that is.
Beyond selling games, Amazon’s relationship to the industry is clumsy. Their forays into development have been unable to transform vast resources into an online game, laying off thousands in the process. Leadership for their gaming wing departed at the start of the year, and their cloud gaming service, Luna, sundowned just last month with no refunds.
“Literally we stopped selling to Amazon,” Fils-Aimé continued, “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. 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.”
