Nintendo just released a fairly run-of-the-mill earnings report for its first fiscal quarter, about which I found absolutely nothing at all to be surprising or alarming.

The Internet at large does not seem to agree, for if you do a Google News search you will find many, many recent stories about Nintendo's upcoming The Legend of Zelda for Wii U. Insofar as the earnings report has absolutely nothing new to add about the new Zelda, you may wonder what exactly everyone is on about.

In a nutshell: Nintendo, as it has done every quarter without fail for several years, included a list of game software titles that it plans to launch in the future. On this list, the Wii U Legend of Zelda appears with "TBD" as its release date. (This remains unchanged from its status in Nintendo's previous quarterly fiscal report that it issued in early May.) Many writers have decided that absence of evidence is evidence of absence; that is, "TBD" is a possible indicator that the game is not coming in 2016.

Sit down. Take a breath. This means absolutely nothing.

The game schedules in Nintendo's earnings reports simply indicate what the company has already announced. If a game is slated for 2016 on the list, that means that Nintendo has, at some point, stated publicly that it intends to release it in 2016. If a game says "TBD," that means that Nintendo has not said anything publicly about its release date.

And indeed, we know that this is true since Nintendo held off on talking about Zelda at E3 entirely and that it did not ever say the words "2016" or "next year" or anything when it delayed Zelda out of 2015, earlier this year.

At this point, Zelda's status is unchanged. It has no release date. Nintendo could announce a release date tomorrow, or it could avoid talking about Zelda at all until next year's E3. We don't know. The lack of a release date tells us absolutely nothing about the status of the project, as some writers have surmised. It doesn't "prove" that Nintendo "lacks confidence" that it'll get the game out next year, as more than one writer stated.

Nintendo could, of course, delay Zelda into 2017, move it to the upcoming NX console, turn it into a Facebook farming simulator, or whatever it wants. But today's earnings report is not an indication of anything other than the fact that it has not yet publicly announced a date.