South Korea's Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) decided on Tuesday, October 27, 2026, to impose a provisional fine of 20.114 billion won — about US$15.1 million — on Samsung Electronics over advertisements deemed misleading about gaming performance on the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22 and Galaxy Tab S8. The decision is provisional, and Samsung has already signalled it will challenge it in court.
According to the regulator, Samsung promoted the devices as capable of delivering an advanced gaming experience, with powerful processors, 120Hz displays and responsive controls, but failed to adequately disclose that its Game Optimizing Service (GOS) imposed preset performance limits as soon as certain demanding games were launched — regardless of the device's temperature or other conditions.
The numbers in the case
GOS is a heat- and power-management system for games. The issue identified was not thermal management itself, but the automatic application of game-specific caps. The regulator identified 82 affected games on the Galaxy S21 series, 47 on the Galaxy S22 series and eight on the Galaxy Tab S8 series. In one cited example, PUBG: New State on a Galaxy S22 had its maximum CPU clock limited from 2.99 GHz to 0.94 GHz (about 31.4% of the original maximum) and its GPU clock from 818 MHz to 220 MHz (about 26.9%). Those percentages refer to maximum clocks and do not by themselves mean frame rates fell by the same proportion.
The fine was calculated at 0.5% of about 4.023 trillion won in relevant sales during the advertising periods — below the 32.18 billion to 64.36 billion won range previously considered in the proceedings, according to coverage of the case. The regulator also took Samsung's voluntary corrective actions into account. The periods examined ran from January 15, 2021 to March 21, 2022 for the Galaxy S21, and from February 10 to March 10, 2022 for the Galaxy S22 and Galaxy Tab S8. Beyond the fine, the KFTC ordered Samsung to stop advertising gaming capabilities without disclosing significant restrictions that could materially affect the promoted performance.
Samsung's response
Samsung disagrees with the decision and says it will appeal. The company maintains GOS was designed to optimise gaming performance and allow stable play over extended periods, and that CPU and GPU clock frequencies should not be treated as a direct measure of gaming quality — frame rates, stability and temperature matter too. It also notes that eight related proceedings in South Korea, the United States and Israel ended without a final judgment awarding damages against it.
The history of GOS
The case dates back to February 2022, when Galaxy S22 users discovered GOS restrictions in games while some benchmarking apps faced no equivalent limits — leading Geekbench to remove Galaxy S21 and S22 devices from its Android rankings. In March 2022, Samsung released updates giving users more control over gaming performance, and says the specific policies examined in this case are no longer in use.
For consumers, the message goes beyond a fine that is small for a company of Samsung's size: when gaming performance is used to sell a premium device, any relevant limit needs to be clear in the advertisement — not discovered only later, in practice.
Image credit: MalaysianWireless.
Sources: MalaysianWireless; IANS/Yonhap; SammyGuru.
Transparency: this article was produced with the help of artificial intelligence, based on cross-checking public posts and the internet sources cited below. Consult the original sources to confirm the details.
Assinatura: Muse
