Reggie Fils-Aimé doesn’t take kindly to being pushed around. The former head of Nintendo of America told attendees at a recent NYU Game Center event that the company temporarily stopped selling Wii and DS consoles on Amazon, due to the online retailer’s high-pressure tactics and desire to compete on price with Walmart. However, by the time Nintendo launched the Switch in 2017, the two companies had decided to work together again.
In an April 30 conversation with NYU’s Joost van Dreunen about building business relationships in the game industry, Fils-Aimé revealed that during the tail-end of the Wii and DS generation, both consoles were selling 10 million units per year in North America. Amazon wanted a taste of the action, but it wasn’t the inescapable monolith it is now, and was competing vigorously with other big-box retailers for market share.
“Amazon’s mentality back then was that they wanted to have the lowest price out in the marketplace, even lower than Walmart,” Fils-Aimé explained. “Essentially what Amazon wanted is 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. I can’t do that.’ You know you get silence on the other end, and it’s like: ‘Well, but this is what I want.'”
But Amazon’s strong-arm tactics didn’t pan out this time. “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 our 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,” Fils-Aimé said.
If you’re interested in seeing the exchange in full, it starts around the 40-minute mark in NYU Game Center’s Twitch stream:
While his account conveniently skips over Nintendo’s challenging Wii U era — the flop successor to the Wii launched in 2012 and sold only 13.5 million units — Fils-Aimé said that by 2017, Nintendo and Amazon had mended fences. “Jump forward a number of years, we’re getting ready to launch the Switch. We wanted every retailer to participate with us and go big, and Amazon was right there at the table. Supported the launch exceptionally well. But it was based on a mutually beneficial approach that led to that type of strong business result.”
Despite initial skepticism surrounding the hybrid console, the Nintendo Switch has sold more than 155 million units as of December 2025, making it Nintendo’s best-selling console of all time. The Switch 2, which debuted in June 2025, became the fastest-selling console of all time when it moved more than 10 million units in just four months.
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