Sega has substantially delayed the release of its 3DS games, including the ninja action game Shinobi.
Image courtesy Sega

Sega gave software-starved Nintendo 3DS owners some bad news on Tuesday, saying that it would delay the release of two of its upcoming 3DS games, Crush 3D and Shinobi, to February 21, 2012 and November 15, 2011 respectively.

While Sega gave no official reason for the delay (and declined to comment further to Wired.com), one of the games’ developers made no bones about it. In an interview published Monday on Gamesindustry.biz, Zoe Mode studio chief Paul Mottram said his game Crush was bumped thanks to sluggish sales of the $250 handheld.

“But now we’re finding that everyone is not knowing what platform is going to succeed — we did our first 3DS title — we got Crush onto that, but we had to delay the release of that because of the success of the platform,” he said.

Call it the Catch-3DS. Good software sells gaming hardware, but risk-averse software makers won’t release games unless the hardware sells.

Nintendo originally announced that Crush 3D would be one of the first games released on the Nintendo 3DS. Sega showed the game and Shinobi at E3 in June.

The 3DS launched in March with a weak software lineup and a relatively high price tag. A month later, Nintendo said that sales were not up to its own expectations.

3DS has several distinct challenges; Nintendo faces increased competition from smartphone gaming, and there is a certain degree of sticker shock associated with the device’s cutting-edge glasses-free 3-D display.

But the primary mover of game hardware is game software. As analyst Michael Pachter said following Nintendo’s April sales report, the Kyoto gamemaker could turn things around with “compelling software.”

“Nintendo is far from emergency mode.”

Sega surely understands that Crush and Shinobi are not system-sellers. They’re the sort of B-games that someone who already has a 3DS would buy to supplement his library, not the thing that causes one to drop $250 on a new machine.

Based on historic sales data, the kinds of games that would cause fence-sitters to drop the cash on 3DS are Mario Kart and Super Mario, both due this holiday season. It’s also important to note that this year will be 3DS’ first Christmas, the period in which Nintendo does a colossal amount of its business.

Jesse Divnich, vice president of analyst services at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, says he expects 3DS’ install base to increase from 3 million to 9 million this year.

“I don’t believe Nintendo has to do anything quite yet,” he said in an email. “They are far from ‘emergency’ mode.”

The irony is that publishers often complain that they’re crowded out of the market on Nintendo platforms because Nintendo’s own games are too strong. At this point, Nintendo is releasing practically nothing on 3DS; by that logic this is the perfect time to release games. But when push comes to shove, it seems like publishers don’t want to release their games until there are more systems out there — that is, until Nintendo sweetens the pot by releasing their own killer app software.