You'll Need a Phone Number to Play Overwatch 2

Anyone who has fun in Overwatch can now be more effectively banned

The blog post says Overwatch 2 is adding SMS Protect to help with issues of account verification and banning disruptive players. Free-to-play games sometimes suffer from higher rates of cheaters, so-called smurfs (experienced players who deliberately lose matches so they can play at lower skill tiers) and other disruptive players when there are no barriers to entry. Adding phone numbers is one way to block those kinds of players.

"The same phone number cannot be used on multiple accounts at the same time, and players can't use the same phone number to create multiple accounts," Blizzard says in the blog post. "A phone number can only be used once when making a new account, and certain types of numbers, including pre-paid and VOIP, cannot be used for SMS Protect."