I guess you can turn it off. It would make no sense for it to be permanent...if it is then Miiverse it's going to be very annoying.

You need internet to use Miiverse, so why not download only? Someone that doesn't want it or someone that doesn't have internet doesn't need it pre-installed on the system. Good move by Ninty, now we only need details.

my thoughts exactly.  odd choice by nintendo.

if i remember correctly, there is a unified system that developers are not required to utilize thus making it up to each game to individually decide if they want to support it or not.   i think...or at least that is how i understood it.

If you want to push a service, it's best to make it as easily available to the consumer as possible. The more steps you require, the more consumeres you are likely to lose. For example, requiring you to download the service likely means that millions of consumers will never use this feature, either because they're unaware of/incapable of installing it (don't laugh, it'll happen), or because their interest is too low to make them bother. The latter group may have contained people who would use the service if they'd sampled it, but who will never use it because the barrier, as low as it is, was still too high.

I'm assuming they're probably still tweaking it, and don't want to ship out an incomplete or buggy version.

That's where Nintendo f'ed up.

That's why cross game chat isn't part of the system.
That's why there technically isn't a unified awards system.
That's why Nintendo's system may be overall behind Live/PSN evolution into nextgen.

Idk, I think this stuff should be part of the OS and guaranteed part of every game. Simply adds  social layer as a guarantee to the devs and users.

I'm glad it will be there day one, but it should have just been a primary OS component. Maybe I'm jumping the gun here and it will turn out perfectly fine. But no Nintendo Direct that focuses on it is disheartening and leading to great speculation.

wait wait, hold up – didn’t Iwata (or maybe Reggie) say in a Nintendo Direct that Miiverse was the first thing you’ll see when you start up your Wii U? Thus making it, I assume, standard and not downloadable? I thought Miiverse was the home screen for the Wii U - If it is downloadable, then it can’t be the home screen I assume.

I think it wont be much of a big issue at all considering so many people already download stuff like crazy anyway.  It wont be completely out of the ordinary.

That stands to reason: mine was a typo, so you can have a technical vicory on puns and I'll go have a talk with my browser's spellchecker...

*grabs crowbar*

Maybe its an automatic update/download when you hook it up online?

They might just still be refining it for launch and so haven't directly installed it?