US: Reggie talks about the Amazon and Nintendo rift that happened

Former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has recently spoken to attendees at NYU Game Centre Lecture Series about a range of topics and one that cropped up was about the rift that grew between Amazon in the USA and Nintendo. He explained that Amazon wanted to be the forefront of video game sales undercutting its rivals. He said that one of the executives at the company called him and said that they wanted “an obscene amount of support, financial support.” from Nintendo which Reggie pointed out was illegal and would put Nintendo out of favour with other video game retailers in the United States. So Nintendo stopped selling their products on Amazon US for a time. Here’s what he told attendees:

At that time, you know.. just in the Americas, I was selling 10 million DS’ a year, we’re driving a lot of revenue. We had a lot of scale. And, at the time, 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 Wal-Mart. And one of their executives called me.. well it was a conversation that got to me after it had progressed through all of the levels of my sales organization, and essentially what Amazon wanted is they wanted an obscene amount of support, financial support, so they could have the lowest price and beat Wal-Mart. I literally said to the executive: “you know that’s illegal, right? I can’t do that.” You know you get silence on the other end “but this is what I want.” 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 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.