Former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé is spilling some tea about Amazon.
Speaking at the NYU Game Centre lecture series last week, Fils-Aimé shared how Nintendo once ended business with the e-commerce giant after it was asked to break the law. According to Fils-Aimé, Amazon was looking to get more heavily into the gaming space towards the end of the Wii and DS era. It was during this time, he says, that the tech giant started talking to Nintendo.
“Essentially, what Amazon wanted, is they wanted an obscene amount of support – financial support – so they can have the lowest price and beat Walmart. I literally said to the executive, ‘You know, that’s illegal. I can’t do that,’” said Fils-Aimé. “You know, you get silence on the other end, and it’s like, ‘but this is what I want.’ Literally, we stopped selling to Amazon, and it’s because I wasn’t going to do something illegal.”
Fils-Aimé added that such a move would have risked the relationships that Nintendo had with other retailers. “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, overtime, you build respect,” he said.
In the end, Nintendo and Amazon would eventually work together, starting with the launch of the Nintendo Switch in 2017. There was a brief period last year when Japanese gaming giant’s products were removed from Amazon, which some had speculated was because of the retailer’s third-party resellers. Nintendo denied this, however, and its products were returned to Amazon shortly after.
Fils-Aimé retired from Nintendo in 2019, with the appropriately named Doug Bowser taking over as Nintendo of America president. (Bowser was himself succeeded on January 1, 2026, by Nintendo of America legal and marketing veteran Devon Pritchard.) Since leaving Nintendo, Fils-Aimé has been serving on the board at various companies, including GameStop and Toronto’s own Spin Master. In 2022, he also wrote a book called Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo about his prolific career, covering his time at Pizza Hut, Procter & Gamble, Panda Express and, of course, Nintendo.
Image credit: Nintendo
Source: NYU Game Center Via: IGN
