Reggie Fils-Aimé’s Amazon story says a lot about Nintendo

Reggie Fils-Aimé has been at it again. The big bruiser of an executive was boss of Nintendo of America from 2006 to 2019, and became the unlikely face of Nintendo for a spell thanks to his prowling, confident, meme-ready presentations at E3. Now retired, he loves to dine out on anecdotes about his successes there — and this week, he’s been bragging about the time he showed Amazon the door.

The story, as told during an onstage conversation at NYU Game Center, goes like this. During the tail end of the Wii and Nintendo DS generation — probably in the early 2010s — Reggie got a call from an executive at Amazon who was asking for “an obscene amount of financial support” so that Amazon could have an even lower retail price on the two massive-selling consoles than Walmart. Reggie countered that this would be illegal. The Amazon executive wouldn’t back down, so Nintendo stopped selling to Amazon at all.

“It set the stage to say, ‘Look, you’re not going to push me around,'” Reggie said. “‘This is the way we do business.'” Taking your ball and walking away from the biggest online retailer in the universe. Can you imagine!

A caveat here: Reggie has always loved nothing better than a bit of braggadocio, and making himself look tough and principled at the same time. He’s also a good storyteller, and storytellers exaggerate. This story may not be true, or not completely true.

But it has a ring of truth to it. Firstly, because Nintendo really was at the top of the world at the time, enjoying a level of sales success and cultural relevance that it doesn’t even have now, thanks to the novelty and mass-market appeal of the Wii and DS. Reggie boasted that, at the time, Nintendo was selling 10 million units of each console a year in the Americas alone, and I can believe it. Circa 2010, Nintendo really might have had the hubris to tell Amazon, of all companies, to go shove it.

Secondly, you can swap Reggie and his big, boastful personality out of the story, and it still sounds true. Nintendo in the era of the fearsome Hiroshi Yamauchi would have done the same. Nintendo even holds Amazon at arm’s length now; it’s notable how often and how quickly the retailer runs out of stock of physical Nintendo games, presumably because Nintendo prefers to keep a wide spread of retailers happy and not put all its eggs in one basket.

Reggie said that, at the time, he wasn’t going to do anything that would put Nintendo’s relationship with other retailers at risk. This is core to the company’s identity. It was a manufacturer of toys and playing cards before, and it still thinks like one, even in the digital age. Its retailer relationships are paramount (which makes it all the more surprising that it has taken the unprecedented step of undercutting them with its digital pricing, but that’s another story).

Nintendo is still in the business of selling boxes, it has always known its own value, it fundamentally mistrusts the internet, and it has never been in the habit of chasing fads. Amazon might be able to sell more Nintendo boxes than anyone else, but if the price of that is that you can’t walk into a store and buy one, Nintendo isn’t interested.

I’d love to have seen Reggie tell Jeff Bezos to get lost to his face. And do you know what? I bet he would.