Former Nintendo of America president, Reggie Fils-Aimé, claims stock pressure and “obscene” demands contributed to the company withdrawing the sale of Wii and DS systems on Amazon.
Addressing guests at the NYU Game Centre lecture series, Fils-Aimé reflected on pressure Amazon had placed on Nintendo for “an obscene amount of support […] so they could have the lowest price and beat Walmart”.
“At that time, just in the Americas, I was selling ten million Wiis, DS’ a year. We’re driving a lot of revenue,” Fils-Aimé said. “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 was that they wanted to have the lowest price out in the marketplace, even lower than Walmart.
“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 organisation, and essentially what Amazon wanted is 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? I can’t do that’. You know you get silence on the other end, and it’s like: ‘Well, 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 our 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.”
The firms had, of course, kissed and made up by the time the original Switch came around.
“Jump forward a number of years, we’re getting ready to launch the Switch. We wanted every retailer to participate with us and go big, and Amazon was right there at the table. Supported the launch exceptionally well. But it was based on mutually beneficial approach that led to that type of strong business result.”
Fils-Aimé joined Nintendo of America in 2003, ending his tenure as president and COO to retire in 2019. He became the public face for the firm during phenomenal rollout of the company’s Wii and DS hardware.
Just a couple of weeks back, Nintendo launched a surprise pop-up store in London. The Nintendo Experience Zone, available now in the Argos Store on Tottenham Court Road, offers a range of goodies, from games and consoles to plushies, figures, and collectibles from right across Nintendo’s impressive IP catalogue.
