Former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime made a shocking revelation about one of the company’s business partners, the retail giant Amazon.
He shared this story in a recent talk at NYU:
Amazon was looking to get bigger into the video game space. 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.”
Fils-Aime went on to say that he decided to stop selling on Amazon then and there. We have seen the consequences of this for years without knowing why. Pre-orders of Nintendo games would keep getting cancelled, and Amazon famously did not carry the Switch 2 at launch.
Reggie’s description of the scheme sounds like price fixing. This may be a situation where Reggie had to wait for a statute of limitations to end to talk about it.
Amazon and Walmart are both listed as official Nintendo retailers today.
