Samsung faces potential fines of at least $24 million from South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) over the Game Optimization Service (GOS) issue affecting the Galaxy S22 and Galaxy Tab S8, after four years of scrutiny by the regulator.
What is the Galaxy S22 GOS controversy?
When the Galaxy S22 series launched in 2022, users discovered that the Xclipse 920 GPU inside the Exynos 2200 chip fell to less than half of its peak performance under sustained workloads such as long gaming sessions. In those scenarios, Samsung implemented GOS to artificially reduce GPU performance to prevent the Exynos chip from overheating.
About 1,800 Galaxy users subsequently filed a class-action lawsuit in South Korea. A Seoul court ruled that Samsung’s advertisements for the Galaxy S22 series could mislead consumers into expecting peak performance while, over extended use, they would receive less than half the claimed performance. The court initially dismissed monetary claims because proving direct financial damages was deemed difficult.
Samsung defense and the FTC finding
Samsung has argued that GOS follows a standard, industry-wide practice to manage heat and power consumption, saying performance is severely affected only in a select few heavy games such as Genshin Impact. South Korean investigators rejected this defense, characterizing GOS and the associated performance throttling as “uniform mandatory measures” that artificially restrict top-tier hardware performance.
The controversy and backlash over Exynos performance led Samsung to temporarily remove its in-house processors from flagship phones; the Galaxy S23 series relied exclusively on Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. The FTC concluded that Samsung’s marketing and advertisements for the Galaxy S22 series constitute deceptive advertising and assessed the matter as a serious violation. Officials have proposed a corrective order intended to prevent Samsung from concealing, downplaying, or omitting maximum performance limits in future product advertisements.
