Image: Blizzard
“It feels like being punished for being poor,” Overwatch player Richard Meunster told Kotaku via email. Along with 19 million other people, Richard and his brother use Cricket Wireless, one of the prepaid phone services that Overwatch 2 won’t accept for its newly installed mandatory two-factor authentication system, SMS Protect.
All Overwatch 2 players, including those who have previously purchased Overwatch, must provide a phone number that meets certain requirements in order to start the game. As part of these requirements, numbers cannot be attached to a prepaid phone plan, landline or use VOIP. While what’s left of Blizzard’s heart seems to be in the right place (the developer hopes the requirement will reduce “both disruptive behavior and cheating”), players like Richard are being forgotten. Not because they don’t play well or don’t care or don’t want to have fun, but because they can’t afford the right kind of phone.
Prepaid phone plans like Cricket and Mint Mobile allow people to pay the cost of their usage up front. Although they’re unfairly hyped as Breaking Bad-type “record phones,” prepaid phones are easier to fit into low-income budgets, costing between $15 and $50 a month. Some companies like AT&T even advertise prepaid services directly to low-income customers.
Richard, a college student, uses Cricket’s $50 monthly plan because “if you can’t pay it that month, they hang up the phone instead of taking you to collections.”
“If I have a regular phone plan and then I can’t pay, my credit score is destroyed,” he said.
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At one point in 2020, there were 74 million prepaid phone plan users in the US alone. Richard is far from the only Overwatch player to be phased out.
“I’m embarrassed to have a prepaid phone,” said one Reddit user, who posted ar/Overwatch and received a thousand upvotes in less than 24 hours. “I never thought I’d be disqualified from playing Overwatch because of my ability to pay a phone contract, but here we are…Blizzard is the first company to make me feel too poor to play a game.”
Read more: Get ready for these 7 big Overwatch 2 gameplay changes
“Can’t believe Blizzard is denying people on prepaid phone plans access to Overwatch 2,” wrote one Twitter user. “Why does it matter how I pay my phone bill? 6 years of my life, all my time, money and progress down the drain.”
Blizzard’s phone restrictions appear to primarily and broadly hurt US prepaid phone plan users, and the company did not return Kotaku’s request for comment in time for publication. Prepaid phone users in other countries have reported being able to log into the game without problems, which some players speculate could be because their country requires ID to buy a prepaid phone or because Blizzard just banned plans known prepaid phone.
“This is why the system won’t stop hackers or smurfs,” wrote one Reddit user. They will just use a virtual number service that Blizz doesn’t know about.
While Blizzard fixes this, Richard and many other low-income prepaid phone users suffer.
“It seems like a huge injustice,” Richard said. “Cheap postpaid plans are around $90. If you’re a prepaid phone owner who really wants to play Overwatch 2, you’re looking at another $50 a month to get a Blizzard-approved phone. Talk about going to play for free”.