Reggie Fils-Aimé reveals Amazon’s unusual request for Nintendo to bypass legal boundaries.

Back in the days of the DS, Nintendo made the bold move to cut ties with Amazon. During a recent talk at NYU, former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé explained that the split was due to Amazon’s demand for preferential treatment, which could have jeopardized Nintendo’s relationships with other retailers and possibly crossed legal boundaries.

Fortunately, the two companies have since reconciled, and you can now snag a Switch 2 on Amazon. However, for quite some time, Nintendo consoles were mostly absent from the platform. In the 2000s, Amazon was aggressively branching out from books and attempting to dominate the market with lower prices. Fils-Aimé noted that Amazon aimed to undercut even Walmart and was asking for an “obscene amount of financial support.”

While he didn’t go into detail about the specific financial demands, Fils-Aimé recounted telling the Amazon executive, “You know that’s illegal, right? I can’t do that.” He emphasized that this was a key reason for ending the partnership with Amazon:
> “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.”