Overwatch 2 will require players to link a phone number to their Battle.net account in order to play, a new requirement that wasn't elaborated on in much detail in a recent Blizzard blog post announcing the change. Now, Blizzard is giving more details on why the new SMS Protect requirement is necessary, and it largely comes down to combatting cheaters.

When Overwatch 2 arrives on October 4, all players, even ones who had purchased the original Overwatch and those playing on consoles, will need to link a phone number to their Battle.net account in order to play. The same phone number can't be used for multiple accounts, and Blizzard won't accept pre-paid and VOIP numbers.

In a new interview with Forbes, Blizzard explains that the change is to prevent bad actors from being able to use cheats and cycle through multiple additional accounts that all share the same phone number. Previously, the box price of Overwatch served as a cost when it came to players being banned and needing to create a new account. Now that the game is going free to play, the barrier to entry is much lower, and so Blizzard needed some other solution.