We thought Mad Catz Interactive only made gaming peripherals, but it seems we were mistaken. The company announced it is working on a flight simulation game called Combat Pilot.

Apparently, Mad Catz also has its own developers, as it announced the PC game is being produced by the internal team at ThunderHawk Studios. The game based off of Flight Simulator X from Microsoft will try and bring a brand new style of multiplayer gameplay to the genre. As the name suggests, players will be trained to become fighter pilots with combat operations training. More so, this learning element will be mandatory knowledge to participate in the multiplayer events with your peers. As such, flight sim fans needn’t worry about “noobs” crowding their air space. Everyone will earn their wings, quite literally. Darren Richardson from Mad Catz pitched this line: “We believe that Combat Pilot will prove to be an important destination for the flight simulation community to gather, interact, and share experiences.”

We truly hope this new venture will be successful, as recent news proves their optimism to be hard fought. Just this week, Microsoft reported the shutdown of Microsoft Flight, the free-to-play simulation released only 5 months earlier on Steam. According to Kotaku, this news also comes with several people from their Vancouver studio getting the boot. If a free flight sim is proving hard to monetize, then let’s hope Combat Pilot will do better when it launches this summer with a subscription based model.