Reggie Fils-Aimé has opened up about the time an Amazon executive gave him a phone call and asked Nintendo to do something “illegal” during the era of the Nintendo DS.
The former Nintendo of America president recalled what sounds to have been a tense conversation at a recent lecture at New York University (via Nintendo Everything). It was a talk that saw him cover the ups and downs from his time in charge of the Wii and Switch maker, but it’s the company’s tumultuous relationship with Amazon that may have caught the audience’s attention more than anything else.
Fils-Aimé remembers the phone call as happening toward the “tail end of the Wii and DS generation,” or sometime around the late 2000s or early 2010s. His involvement in its sales saw him “driving a lot of revenue” at the same time that Amazon was looking to get more into video games and “have the lowest price out in the marketplace.”
“It was a conversation that got to me after it had progressed through all of the levels of my sales organization,” Fils-Aimé said. “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.’ 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.”
