Amazon: “Nintendo is here to stay and Nintendo will do very well this year”

It’s weird to watch Amazon and Nintendo interact. The two companies have been at odds in the past with 3DS and Wii U sales, but occasionally something crops up that might hint at the two working together once again, only to have those hopes dashed by news of Amazon ceasing the selling of Wii Us or some other catastrophic bit of mishap. Today, however, Amazon seems to be on the positive side of the big N. Here’s what they had to say about the company’s future:

“Contrary to a lot of people’s opinion, Nintendo is here to stay and Nintendo will do very well this year. They’re not going to meet their expectations, absolutely, but they’ve still got strong franchises and strong hardware and if you look at the back end of last year when they had a fairly good release slate, it certainly drove their hardware. 3DS has done very well for us so that format is here to stay.

“I think Nintendo have this [negative view] imposed on them and it’s driven by a lot of the media, and the media drives perception,” he said. “Nintendo are getting a lot of bad press and PR and as soon as anything negative is out there it’s a media frenzy. It diminishes what they’ve actually done. If you look at 3DS as a format, it has done very well last year – had that sort of performance been with Microsoft or Sony, my personal opinion is that everybody would be thinking ‘wow, what a fantastic job’. Because it’s Nintendo and they’ve been embroiled in this negative PR frenzy, everyone thinks it’s a dying format. It’s absolutely not.”

– Amazon.co.uk’s category leader of videogames and software Ketu Patel

So at least in the UK, and at least within the game’s division of the company, Amazon appears to be feeling more or less positively about Nintendo. That’s sort of nice, right?

EDGE Online (full interview) via ONM