Buried within an interesting New York Times piece on how browser-based gaming is threatening the stability of traditional videogame economic models is the astonishing estimation from Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, that only 3.3% of Nintendo Wii games to date have turned a profit.

While there’s no direct quotation from Fils-Aime and the remarks are given no context (we’re not told if he was speaking to the paper or if they have pulled the information from elsewhere), the thrust of his argument is that the average Wii title needs to sell at least a million copies to make money.

While he claims that this is a lower threshold than is required for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 systems, according to NPD only 16 of the 484 games available for the system as of March 1st 2009 have sold that number.

The fact that nine of those titles are Nintendo-developed perhaps dispels the popular perception that the system has been a money-printing machine for casual game developers.

The piece also reports Reggie arguing that the lack of high-defenition capability in the system was a deliberate choice to help developers lower their costs and thus increase the chance of turning a profit, a plan that clearly isn’t working out.

Regardless of the accuracy of these estimations, their message matches the tone of this year’s Game Developer’s Conference which, according to industry prophet Raph Koster, reflected a concensus amongst attendees that “digital distribution models, UGC, playing in a browser, microtransactions, indiegames and web models” represent the future, while the “traditional publishers are dinosaurs in trouble”.

No matter how unfeasibly sci-fi OnLive’s claims to provide a Spotify for videogames might sound at the moment, the obvious hunger amongst consumers for such a service bespeaks a certain type of future that, one way or another, we will surely arrive at soon.