Reggie Fils-Aimé Says Nintendo Halted Amazon Sales Over Illegal Price Demand

Reggie Fils-Aimé said Nintendo chose to walk away from Amazon rather than back a pricing arrangement he described as illegal, a decision that showed how seriously Nintendo of America treated channel control during the Wii and Nintendo DS era. In a conversation at New York University’s NYU Game Center on April 30, 2026, the former president and COO said the Amazon request came after it moved through several layers of his sales organization and reached him as a demand for financial support so Amazon could sell Nintendo hardware and games at the lowest price in the market, even below Walmart.

Fils-Aimé said he pushed back directly. “You know that’s illegal, right? I can’t do that,” he recalled telling the Amazon executive. He said the answer was blunt enough that the relationship effectively ended: “Literally we stopped selling to Amazon.” His account turned the episode into more than a one-off retail fight. It was, in his telling, a line in the sand about whether Nintendo would let one partner force terms that could undermine the rest of its retail network.

That mattered because Nintendo was in a strong position at the time. Fils-Aimé said the company was selling about 10 million DS units a year in the Americas, giving Nintendo leverage that many consumer brands do not have when a major retailer pushes for special treatment. He said the decision was also about protecting relationships with other partners, a reminder that channel strategy is as much about trust as volume. For a company built on long-term franchise value and a quality-first image, a short-term pricing win was not worth sending the message that a single retailer could dictate the rules.

The dispute has a clear echo in Nintendo’s more recent Amazon troubles. In 2025, Nintendo pulled U.S. products from Amazon amid disagreements over unauthorized third-party sales and prices that undercut Nintendo’s advertised rates, according to the later account of the issue. Nintendo products returned to Amazon in June 2025, around the same period the Nintendo Switch 2 launched in the United States at a suggested retail price of $449.99. Amazon said it was pleased to offer Nintendo products directly to customers, but the repeated tension suggests the company’s retail relationship with Amazon has been unstable for years, not just during the Switch 2 rollout.