OnePlus announced its partnership with esports brand Fnatic in early 2019, which saw the phone maker’s name plastered across the official Fnatic team jersey, but the branding exercise also stretched in the other direction, with ‘Fnatic mode’ serving as the name used for the dedicated gaming mode built into OxygenOS – OnePlus’ Android-based smartphone experience. After installing the latest OxygenOS beta for their OnePlus 7 Pro, one eagle-eyed user ( T1Az on Reddit) shared their findings on the r/OnePlus subreddit, showing that the Fnatic branding had seemingly been wiped clean from the OS, replaced by a more generic-sounding ‘Pro Gaming mode’. The OxygenOS 11 open beta originally reached OnePlus 7 Pro and 7T Pro devices in January this year, letting interested users trial the upgrade to Android 11 before its official release. Fast-forward to 1 March and open beta 3 brought with it a number of small fixes and improvements but failed to mention the move to Pro Gaming mode within its changelog. Aside from the name change, the functionality of what was Fnatic mode is reportedly unaltered, letting users limit notifications and redirect CPU, GPU and RAM resources for greater performance while gaming. Once the discovery was made, XDA Developers reached out to OnePlus to establish the reasoning behind the name change and whether it was, as many had already suspected, as a result of a formal end to their partnership. OnePlus responded, “OnePlus’ partnership with Fnatic has come to its natural and mutual conclusion. Users of OnePlus devices who have enjoyed our Fnatic mode will continue to receive the same features and capabilities, but under a new Pro Gaming Mode name. The naming update will transition across devices starting from the 6 series. Fnatic has been a supportive partner to OnePlus, and we look forward to the opportunity to collaborate again in the future.” As OnePlus states, OnePlus 6 series and up should see the shift from Fnatic mode to Pro Gaming mode in their next official update.
