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If you've ever tried to buy a first-party Nintendo product in the US on Amazon - including Switch 2 - you might have noticed that the mega-retailer's selection is limited. A new report appears to confirm players' long-standing suspicions that there's been a quiet beef between the two companies, and apparently "a disagreement over unauthorized sales" is to blame.
Nintendo "stopped selling on Amazon after noticing that third-party merchants were offering games for sale in the US at prices that undercut Nintendo’s advertised rates," according to a new report from Bloomberg (paywalled), citing an anonymous person familiar with the situation between the two companies.
"Enterprising sellers were buying Nintendo products in bulk in Southeast Asia and exporting them to the US," the report alleges. Amazon is then said to have promised Nintendo that its official retail listings would have labels guaranteeing their authenticity, but Nintendo apparently wasn't biting.
Nintendo and Amazon both dispute Bloomberg's report, but did not offer any alternative explanation for why Nintendo products have been so hard to come by on the site.
As Bloomberg notes, Amazon is now offering seemingly official pre-orders for first-party upcoming Switch 2 games like Donkey Kong Bananza, though you still can't purchase launch games like Mario Kart World or the upgraded editions of Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom.
While the specifics of this situation seem to date back to 2024, speculation about beef between Amazon and Nintendo goes back to at least 2015, when the retailer stopped carrying 3DS consoles. At the time, popular rumors suggested Amazon was unhappy about handling returns for 3DS hinge failures, but those rumors were never corroborated.
The one thing that is sure is that Amazon, at least in the US, is not an option if you're still trying to figure out where to buy Nintendo Switch 2. Whether that changes remains to be seen, but Amazon's already missed out on the ground floor of the fastest-selling Nintendo console ever, and indeed the fastest-selling console of all time.
Our list of the best Switch 2 games includes several third-party titles, and many of those remain available on Amazon US, at least.
