Samsung fined $15M over Galaxy game throttling (GOS)

Samsung is paying for a throttling scandal that started in the Galaxy S22 era. The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) has fined the company 20.1 billion won (about $15.1 million) over the way its Game Optimizing Service (GOS) limited phone performance in games, Android Authority reports.

What the regulator objected to

GOS is a system service that Samsung uses to manage heat and battery drain while you play. According to the KFTC's findings, it launched automatically when certain popular games started and could hold the processor back to as little as 30% of its possible performance. Owners had no way to opt out at first.

The problem, in the regulator's view, was the gap between that behaviour and Samsung's marketing. Galaxy ads promised the "ultimate mobile gaming experience", yet the phones were quietly running well below their potential in exactly those games. The fine is about advertising, not about the chips themselves.

Samsung's response

Samsung is not accepting the framing. As quoted by the Seoul Economic Daily, the company stresses that "no court has found that consumers suffered harm because of the advertising." It has not said whether it will appeal.

The fine follows an earlier class-action lawsuit that Galaxy owners in South Korea brought over the same issue. After the 2022 backlash, Samsung released a software update that let owners turn off the performance limits of GOS, which is still how things work on Galaxy phones today.

Why it still matters for buyers

Throttling itself is not a scandal. Every modern phone slows its chip when it gets too hot, because the alternative is a device that burns your hand or damages its battery. What upset Galaxy owners in 2022 was that the limits were tied to specific apps, switched on silently and not reflected in the performance figures used to sell the phones.

The episode is a good reminder that short benchmark scores say little about long gaming sessions. How much speed a phone keeps after 20 minutes depends on its cooling and on how aggressively the maker tunes it, which is why the current argument over Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 overheating claims gets so much attention. Some brands now treat cooling as a selling point, as OnePlus did by putting a built-in fan in the Ace 7.

If your own phone gets hot or slows down in games, our guide on why phones overheat and what to do about it covers the common causes and safe fixes.