Nintendo games now available through Amazon digital store
Starting today, Nintendo games are now available for digital purchase through the Amazon online store. Amazon will offer a selection of popular Nintendo Wii U, Nintendo 3DS and Virtual Console games, as well as some downloadable content …
Context & Ripple Effects
This deal lands months after Nintendo broadened its back-catalog strategy by putting N64 and DS games on Wii U Virtual Console — Amazon becomes the first major outside storefront carrying Wii U, 3DS and Virtual Console downloads alongside DLC.
It also reads differently in hindsight: the partnership eventually soured, with Nintendo pulling its products from Amazon's US site in 2025 after third-party merchants undercut Nintendo's own prices — making this 2015 opening the start of a decade-long tug-of-war over who controls digital game pricing.
First-order effects
- Nintendo gains a high-traffic retail channel beyond its own eShop for Wii U, 3DS, Virtual Console and DLC purchases, while Amazon adds first-party Nintendo inventory to a store that already sells individual cloud titles through Luna's per-game buying model.
Second-order effects
- Opening digital sales to Amazon exposes Nintendo's pricing to marketplace dynamics — third-party sellers reselling codes below Nintendo's rates is precisely what later triggered the US pullout, forcing Nintendo toward tighter channel control.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform owners migrate from renting external storefronts to self-controlled digital distribution: Nintendo's later moves — Virtual Game Cards for porting and lending games and different physical vs. digital prices on Switch 2 — all point toward the publisher owning price and portability end-to-end rather than delegating it to retailers.
The trend: Console makers are steadily reclaiming control of digital game distribution and pricing from retail intermediaries, with each storefront partnership now negotiated against the risk of marketplace undercutting.