Directly from the horse's ass, it seems the corporate overlords are trying to send Overwatch 2 to an early grave as a tax writeoff or something by requiring a SMS number and integrating voice recording in an active moderation stance.

Considering the absolute characters in Acti's upper management, this kind of bludgeoningly terrible idea comes as no surprise. Thoughts?

The gift that keeps on giving. :P
I'm not even surprised as that company keeps stooping lower and lower.

Thoughts?

I hope it works out so well for them that they'll have to start considering bringing OG Warcraft III & Starcraft to GOG, just to stay afloat :P.

Real ID Part Duh.

This has also been going well for Minecraft, banning people from their own "paid private servers". On the bright side, if I were ever to go mentally deranged and try to use Overwatch 2, I couldn't since they don't accept prepaid phone numbers for their SMS requirement. (Just like that terrible Discord service, too.)

One more reason not to play Overwatch 2.

The name of this game speaks for itself.

My main thought is I'm utterly delighted to have grown up in the 90's enjoying the simple fun of local multiplayer Doom, Quake, Age of Empires, etc, before the Internet and its baggage ruined it at both ends (DRM & invasive anti-cheat rootkits at the corporate BS end, and cheaters, 'griefers', 'squeakers', trolls, etc, at the user end when the "casuals" invaded). Today I've lost all interest in MP games so Fortnite, Overwatch, CoD and the 10000 Battle Royale clones can implode all they want.

Who cares, lol.

Blizzard hasn't released anything worth playing in roughly a million years, so anyone affected by this had it coming for playing awful games.

Exactly. Their last new PC game [Warcraft 3] was released 20 years ago this summer. (Or only 19 years if you're generous and include the expansion pack). They haven't made an actual game since. Everything else has been an online money extraction service or a remaster.

The only new Activision game I played and paid money for (after how angry I was at Modern Warfare 2. Well, the FIRST Modern Warfare 2) was THPS 1+2 and then the developers gotten eaten up anyway. Makes EA look real good at times.

Wasnt aware they still existed. Go figure!

Yup, me too... kind of. In fact, I never had any interest in online multiplayer. The only time EVER I've played online multiplayer was here on GOG, when they gave away Aliens vs. Predator for free to test Galaxy's multiplayer-something. I thought GOG would be the best place to play your only few rounds of multiplayer ever.

When I was a kid, "multiplayer" meant that you and your friend had to swap seats every couple of minutes, so that both can play the singleplayer game together.

The 'solution' is to not buy any of their games then, clearly.

StarCraft 2? I don't think it was any more online service than Warcraft 3 with fully offline single player.