Overwatch 2 will require a phone number to play
Games aren&#x27;t games anymore, especially multiplayer titles. _Especially_ competitive multiplayer titles aggressively marketed towards the widest range of players possible.<p>No longer are you simply one player among thousands, you are a uniquely identifiable individual who is allowed (or not) to participate only after identifying yourself to the platform stewards.<p>I don&#x27;t think this is necessarily bad per se but it really escapes the realm of what I consider a &quot;video game&quot;<p>These competitive platforms with broad mainstream appeal are more akin to social networks, with strict rules around identifying yourself and policing of what&#x27;s considered acceptable speech&#x2F;interactions.<p>It makes perfect business sense but I wonder how many people are weirded out by having to explicitly identify themselves to sign up for a video game in the same way they would for a social network&#x2F;plane ticket&#x2F;hotel room&#x2F;etc. It feels less like a game and more like a chore to me if I have to temper and guard my gaming experience because my real-life identity is on the line.<p>Next they will want scans of my photo ID and a picture of me holding the ID next to my face with a timestamp. I&#x27;m being sarcastic here but I also think this is a pretty realistic endgame. We all know that phone number verification won&#x27;t stop anybody with an ounce of motivation to cheat&#x2F;troll&#x2F;whatever. It&#x27;s just an annoying mandated virtue-signal for the real players, as well as a tacitly implied threat: obey the rules, or your real-life UUID goes on the naughty list.<p>To be clear, again I think this makes some sort of sense for an eSports platform, but competitive gaming as a whole kind of escapes me (old school gamer, not the target audience). Maybe they could keep the phone requirement for their professional ladder only?<p>I yearn for the days when my relationship with the game publisher ended when I walked out of the store with my purchase.