Overwatch 2 is technically free to play, but its security measures aren’t

Overwatch 2 is almost here and many fans of the original game, lapsed or otherwise, are excited to return to its world when the sequel officially releases on Oct. 4. Some of those fans, however, might not be able to make the leap from the original game to the sequel, despite its free-to-play status. And that has nothing to do with the game’s price or even microtransactions, and everything to do with cell phones.

Yesterday, the Overwatch team announced a series of new security measures that will launch with Overwatch 2 on Oct. 4. This includes SMS Protect, a new security measure that will require players to enter and confirm a valid phone number that will connect to their Battle.net account to play the game. 

The measure is supposed to help curb cheating and toxic behavior in the game since the phone number measure will make it much more difficult for offenders to create new accounts if their original account gets banned. That’s an important step to take with the game going free-to-play since other FTP games with cheating issues are often plagued by those cheaters being able to easily create new accounts. But it’s also leaving a subsection of the Overwatch community out in the cold: those with prepaid cell phone plans.

Reddit user ZacharyH8 brought up the dilemma on the Overwatch subreddit, noting that they’ve used a prepaid phone plan from Walmart for years that OW2’s SMS Protect won’t accept as a valid phone number. Other popular prepaid services like Cricket Wireless also aren’t accepted by Battle.net, although commenters on the subreddit noted that Mint Mobile phone numbers did appear to work.

You can see the dilemma here. Prepaid plans are often cheaper than standard cell phone contracts and don’t lock you into long-term payment plans, making them ideal for many players. They’re also more easily accessible and difficult to track, which is likely why many prepaid phone numbers won’t work for the purposes of accessing OW2.

While it’s nice to see Blizzard trying to pursue more meaningful ways to curb cheating, toxic chatting, and other forms of gameplay disruption, it also feels like SMS Protect not accepting prepaid cell phone numbers unfairly excludes players who fall below a certain income bracket. Allowing prepaid phone numbers to work in authenticating player accounts may allow certain cheaters and toxic players to get around account bans more easily, but the cost and work of acquiring new prepaid numbers just to play a video game would likely still curb many potential players in that boat.

As it stands, SMS Protect will certainly serve as a deterrent for players to behave badly while playing OW2. Unfortunately, it will also serve as a deterrent to many people playing the game at all.