Flight Simulator Appears on PlayStation Store, But It’s Not What You Expect

UPDATE 11.45am UK: Thronefall developer Grizzly Games has responded to the use of its name and logo by the company behind Flight Simulator 2025 – the Microsoft Flight Sim rip-off that uses AI art which Eurogamer spotted via a PlayStation Store listing earlier today.

“Thanks for contacting us and thank you for bringing awareness to this topic,” Thronefall developer Paul Schnepf Games said in an email to Eurogamer. “We’re not associated with Grizzly Games Ltd. and they’re using both our name and logo illegally.

“Furthermore they seem to incorporate the absolute opposite of our values, of what we stand for and what we’re trying to give to the gaming community. Unfortunately our legal resources are limited as a two-person indie team, but honestly I’d love to see this kind of stuff being stopped, especially since it’s not only happening to us but lots of indie devs that just lack the legal power.”

We’ll update again if we hear from Sony – or the other Grizzly Games.

ORIGINAL STORY 11am UK:
Flight Simulator 2025 is now available to Wishlist on the PlayStation Store – but it’s nothing to do with Microsoft.

Trophies for the game caught the eye of Flight Sim fans overnight via reddit, though it quickly became clear this wasn’t a leak of the actual Flight Sim landing on Sony’s console.

Instead, Flight Simulator 2025 features what looks like AI-generated art for its cover image, and has been made by a developer named Grizzy Games Limited.

A quick search online brings up the Grizzly-Games.com website, which features a long list of supposed mobile projects that also feature clearly AI-generated artwork for their title covers.

These mobile games – Idle Command: Supply Frontline, Merge Blocks Magic Numbers, Color Page ASMR: Drawing Art, etc – all have links to download the apps via the Google Play store, but all of these links are broken. It’s unclear if these games ever existed.

The single game with actual gameplay visible is City Outlet: Store Empire, which looks to be a tycoon game based in a corner of a shopping mall. You can see a trailer of it below:

If the name Grizzly Games sounds familiar, then it’s because this developer shares its name with the developer of popular indie action title Thronefall.

Indeed, the team behind City Outlet: Store Empire and Flight Simulator PS5 is also using the same Grizzly Games logo of the Thronefall team.

We’ve contacted both Grizzly Games for more. We’ve also contacted Sony, which looks set to imminently launch Flight Simulator 2025 on PlayStation.

This isn’t the first time that a knock-off game has been discovered on the PlayStation Store. What looked like a Suika Game rip-off was set to launch on PlayStation previously. Meanwhile, in 2022, we discovered a rubbish God of War rip-off on the Xbox store. And in 2023, Sony launched a copyright claim against a rip-off of The Last of Us on the Nintendo eShop.

For now, perhaps hold off a pre-order of Flight Simulator 2025. The real Microsoft Flight Simulator seems likely to actually turn up on PS5 at some point.