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Since its addition in June, Sly Cooper And The Thievius Raccoonus has become one of the most popular retro classics in the PlayStation Plus Premium catalog.
One of the perks of being a PlayStation Plus Premium member is access to a selection of classic games from the PS1, PS2, and PS3 era that Sony has made available on the subscription service. Three classic PlayStation 2 games were added this month: Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and Tomb Raider: Legends.
According to data gathered by TrueTrophies, while Tomb Raider: Legends has been successful since its launch on the service and is now the third top game on there, it has been knocked out of the water by Sly Cooper, which received almost 40% more active players than the Lara Croft epic in the same week.
Sly Cooper has beaten the previous top title on the PS Plus Premium catalog and usurped the crown from The Legend of Dragoon, which was added to the platform in February 2023.
Could we see a new Sly Cooper game?
The last Sly Cooper game, Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, was released in 2013 for the PlayStation 3. It marked a shift in the franchise and was developed by Sanzaru Games, which had previously made the PS3 ports for the original games made by Sucker Punch Productions.
It has been confirmed that neither Sanzaru nor Sucker Punch have any plans to create a new Sly Cooper game. In 2014, Sanzaru said as much on their Facebook page. This was followed by a 2022 statement by Sucker Punch.
Sucker Punch went on to develop two series that are wildly different from Sly Cooper. In 2009 they launched Infamous, an action-adventure series about a bike messenger. The Infamous franchise saw five games released between 2009 and 2014, after which the studio changed focus again.
In 2020, Sucker Punch Productions released Ghost of Tsushima, a triple-A action-adventure game with an open world, set during the Mongol invasion of Japan. The game is critically well-received and commercially popular, and a sequel is in development.
A leak in May 2024 suggested that the reason for the sequel taking so long in development was that Sucker Punch was developing a new Sly Cooper game. However, Bloomberg’s Jason Schrier was quick to debunk this, attributing the delay to development timeframes and Sucker Punch’s small studio size.
So while there are currently no plans for a Sly Cooper 5, neither Sucker Punch or Sanzaru have ever ruled it out as a possibility for the future, and the success of Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus on PlayStation Plus Premium might reopen some doors.
Featured image credit: Sony Entertainment
