Recently, the former president of Nintendo of America gave a lecture for the NYU Game Center. Reggie Fils-Aimé spoke about why the company decided to stop selling its Wii and DS consoles to Amazon.
According to the ex-manager, he once received a call from an Amazon executive. The interlocutor offered him to break the law — the company wanted to get support to offer the lowest prices on the market:
At that time, in America, I was selling ten million DS units a year — we were generating huge revenue. We had serious scale. And Amazon was then looking to expand its presence in the video game market. Their approach then was to have the lowest prices on the market — even lower than Walmart. And one of their executives called me… or rather, it was a call that reached me after it had gone through all levels of my sales structure. Essentially, Amazon wanted an indecently large amount of support — financial support, so they could set the lowest prices on the market and bypass Walmart. I told that executive directly: “You understand that this is illegal, right? I can’t do that.” And in response, silence on the other end of the line: “But that’s exactly what I want.”
As a result, Nintendo stopped supplying consoles to Amazon. Reggie Fils-Aimé did not want to do anything illegal or spoil relations with other partners:
I wasn't going to do anything that would jeopardize our relationships with other retailers. But it also served as a signal: listen, you're not going to intimidate me and boss me around. This is how we do business. And that's how respect is earned over time.