Amazon Asked Nintendo to Break the Law, Says Reggie

For years, people have wondered why Nintendo and Amazon can't seem to get along. Now we have an answer that goes back nearly two decades, and it's wilder than anyone guessed.

At a recent NYU lecture, former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé recalled a phone call from an Amazon executive during the tail end of the Wii and DS generation. Amazon, then aggressively expanding beyond books into everything, wanted Nintendo to provide an "obscene amount" of financial support so it could price games lower than Walmart. Fils-Aimé's response was blunt: "I literally said to the executive, 'You know, that's illegal, right? I can't do that.'" He says the line went silent before the executive simply repeated the demand. So Nintendo stopped selling to Amazon entirely.

This is a former president of one of the biggest gaming companies on earth flatly accusing Amazon of trying to pressure them into what amounts to illegal price discrimination. That kind of arrangement, where a manufacturer bankrolls one retailer to undercut all others, runs afoul of fair pricing laws for good reason. And the fact that Fils-Aimé says the Amazon exec just pushed harder after being told it was illegal says a lot about the dynamic. I'm honestly surprised it took this long for the story to come out.

The fallout clearly echoed for years. Just last year, Nintendo products including Switch 2 pre-orders vanished from Amazon's U.S. storefront, with both companies denying any dispute. Nintendo games eventually returned to Amazon in June 2025. Fils-Aimé noted that Amazon was "right there at the table" for the original Switch launch in 2017, but only because the relationship had been rebuilt on what he called "a mutually beneficial approach." He framed the whole saga as a lesson in standing your ground: "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." Given how many publishers bend over backwards to keep Amazon happy, Nintendo refusing to play ball is a rare thing in this industry.