Both the official Overwatch and Call of Duty Twitter accounts have confirmed that post-paid phone plans are no longer required in order to play their games, meaning that you can now add a phone number with a pre-paid plan to your Battle.Net account, verify it via SMS, and access the games without issue.
In Call of Duty’s latest installment, Modern Warfare 2, post-paid phone numbers were only a requirement for PC players, and this was much less discussed as fewer players were affected, and it had actually already been a necessity for Call of Duty’s battle royale, Warzone, ever since it launched in 2020.
However, Overwatch 2, being a free-to-play game, had the post-paid requirement on every platform, including console, so the backlash was much greater. If you opted to go for a pre-paid plan because you found it more financially feasible, you simply had no way to play Overwatch 2.
This was even causing prior players, who had purchased the game before it was free-to-play, to get locked out. Existing players were later pardoned from the requirement, but new players were still out of luck, until today. The purpose of this phone requirement in the first place was, as Blizzard stated on their website, to combat “cheating and disruptive behavior, further protecting your Overwatch 2 experience from bad actors.”
The idea is that, since it is a free-to-play game, if someone gets banned for toxicity or for using hacks, they could easily and simply create another account and repeat their offenses. This is much harder if every new account requires verification via a post-paid phone number, as these can be expensive and often need to be committed to long-term.
Pre-paid plans are still paid for though, so this adjustment shouldn’t cause some huge influx of bad actors. However, it will thankfully allow some excited fans, who hadn’t been able to play, to be able to check out Overwatch 2. Modern Warfare 2 already has a solid barrier of entry, as it’s a premium $70 game, so it’s unclear why a phone number requirement is even necessary for that game at all, but at the least, it’s a welcome adjustment that it now also allows pre-paid numbers.