Sony has been adding more PlayStation 2 games to its Classics catalogue on PlayStation Plus, starting with Tomb Raider Legend, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and the first Sly Cooper game. Hopefully, the other two Sly sequels will follow suit. But, in the meantime, it’s said that Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus has been the most popular so far, and has even had the biggest debut ever on PS Plus Premium.
This is according to TrueTrophies, which sampled data from over 3.1 million active PSN accounts. While there are no exact figures, Sly Cooper saw 39.66% more active players the week of its PS Plus launch than Tomb Raider Legend (both games arrived on June 11). It also had 2.5% more players than what PS1 RPG The Legend of Dragoon, the former best-performing PS Plus Premium game, had during its launch week in February 2023.
As a die-hard fan of the Sly series myself, it makes me very happy to know fellow PlayStation owners have flocked to the first game, be they returning fans or curious newcomers. At the very least, this shows there is interest in the series, though I’m hesitant to say this is all the evidence Sony needs to justify launching a hypothetical Sly 5. For starters, while it may rank at the top of the Premium tier, further data from TrueTrophies covering all of PS Plus puts Sly Cooper as only the eighth biggest PS Plus launch of 2024 so far, sitting below indie hit Animal Well and Borderlands spin-off Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands.
Plus, I really can’t think of a Sony owned developer that could take over the Sly series. Sucker Punch, which handled the original trilogy from 2002 to 2005, has made it clear it has moved on from the series, even stressing in a 2022 blog post that no Sly projects were in the works at any studio. It’s also easy to assume the studio is busy working on a possible sequel to Ghost of Tsushima, especially considering how much of a sales success that game was, with its last recorded figures being 9.75 million copies by July 2022, two years after launch.
Sony enlisted Sanzaru Games for the fourth entry, 2013’s Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, but that studio has since been acquired by Facebook and is now part of Oculus Studios. And while Sony has studios well-versed in making 3D platformers, like Ratchet & Clank developer Insomniac Games and Naughty Dog (which made the Jak & Daxter games before moving onto Uncharted and The Last of Us), there are likely far too busy with other projects that would be more of a priority for the company.
A Sly 5 is sorely needed, if only to resolve the cliffhanger ending from Thieves in Time. With the odds of such a sequel happening so low, though, I think us fans will have to pin hopes on Sly 2 and 3 being added to the Classics catalogue, which will hopefully happen sooner rather than later.
