Overwatch 2 launched last week with a variety of issues but it seems to be all resolved now. However, there is a rare occurrence where it seems that hitting that PLAY button in Battle.Net doesn’t launch the game, despite it saying “Playing Now” and the process appearing in Task Manager. This actually happened to me and I wasn’t able to play until today.

First up, looking up this issue, there seems to be an article about it on Battle.Net which you can check out here. It offers up some suggested fixes. These are the same fixes that every other website you look up will also suggest. They may work for you, or they may not. For me, they did not work at all. Instead, what I had to do was actually go into the actual folder where Overwatch 2 is installed and set two .exe files to run as administrator.

To do this, do the following:

Step 1: in Battle.Net, next to the Overwatch 2 Play button, hit the Gear icon (options) and click “Show in Explorer”.

Step 2: Right click on “Overwatch Launcher.exe”, select Properties, and hit the Compatibility tab. In the Settings option, check off “Run this program as an administrator” and then hit the “Change settings for all users” button.

Step 3: Go back to the Explorer window and open the folder “_retail_”. In that folder, right click on “Overwatch.exe”, select Properties, and hit the Compatibility tab. In the Settings option, check off “Run this program as an administrator” and then hit the “Change settings for all users” button.

And that should be it. If you go back to Battle.Net, clicking that Play button for Overwatch 2 should now launch the game properly. At least it did for me. Let me know in the comments below if this worked for you.