Coming right of the heels of their recently announced pseudo price drop, Microsoft wasn’t quite satisfied – they felt like they had to give back more.

Microsoft has long been criticized for putting popular streaming services like Netflix and Hulu behind the Xbox Live Gold pay wall while competitors in the console space offered those services for free.

Well, the days of pay walls are over for Xbox users and Microsoft announced that they are removing the Xbox Live Gold requirement for online streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu.

“Coming in June, anyone with an Xbox will be able to access popular entertainment experiences, whether or not you have an Xbox Live Gold membership.”

However, they weren’t set to stop there as another big rumor popped up concerning the removal of the Kinect from the standard Xbox One console package.  Apparently with the way the Xbox One was constructed with the Kinect in mind, especially with the Kinect being a required pack in device a certain amount of the Xbox One’s CPU power was designated for Kinect features such as voice commands and gestures.

Considering the Kinect is no longer a required device there have been reports that Microsoft is going to unlock that extra CPU power for developers to use too boost the overall performance of the Xbox One as far as gaming goes.

It will be interesting to see if this will help the Xbox One close the lead the Playstation 4 has managed to create.  A good portion of people went with PS4 no doubt due to being able to use it as your living room streaming device without having to pay an additional fee and the additional horsepower the system packed within it’s plastic casing.

How do you think these two moves will affect the battle?