Cricket alone has 12 million subscribers in the US. Metro PCS has ~18 million. Boost Mobile has 8 million.

You're looking at 30 million+ people who flat out cannot even play the game.

Yes, but this was something obvious from the outset from an engineering standpoint. I would never consider requiring phone verification for my games. I don't even require an email account as lots of games do (because of cargo cult) these days.

The Western software development bubble (largely the demographic of HN) is full of self centered people / ignorant people who have never seen hardware aside from a Mac or a $2K Windows box, who buy a new phone literally every year, who claim to be saving the world. On the contrary what you get is web browsers being too slow to run on hardware of someone who lives outside the West and being banned from the game because outside the West you can't conform to the game's asinine requirements. The irony on top of the irony is that the ones who think of themselves affluent for this are not at all: cell phones and their protocols are badly engineered technology.