It looks like the chances of a Sly Cooper 5 making its way to the PlayStation 5 may be diminishing. Facebook just announced that they have acquired Sanzaru Games who developed the last Sly Cooper game. Sony Interactive Entertainment may employ some other studio for developing the next game but the newly-acquired Facebook studio is more likely to be the frontrunner for the job.
Sanzaru Games will keep on making virtual reality games for Facebook after becoming a part of Oculus Studios. Thus nothing has really changed for the developer. Instead of doing contractual work, the US video-game developer is now completely owned by the social media giant.
The US video-game company was founded in 2006 and had a workforce of around 60 developers. They were known for developing games such as Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time and The Sly Collection. Perhaps the studio is best-known for Asgard’s Wrath, the recent VR game. The game was claimed to be one of the best VR games in 2019.
Last year, Sanzaru Games’ Matt Kraemer talked about reviving the Sly Cooper franchise. This is what he had to say:
“We love Sly. I’ll tell you a tidbit of information. The original first episode of Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time was suppose to be Egypt in Sly Tutankhamen and Egypt was going to be a DLC episode. That was the intention and we never got to finish that out. I do [and the team] at Sanzaru have the story and the whole episode done on paper form.”
While Talking to Kinda Funny Games, he continued:
We would love to come back to that world. I hate leaving him there and it’s the question we get the most. So all I can say is that if you guys want more Sly Cooper let Sony know. We are always ready to dig into that and it was a great franchise to work on. It was a great project.
While we may be getting a Sly Cooper TV series soon, it has been almost 7 years since we had a Sly Cooper game. Kraemer showed that Sanzaru Games is definitely interested in re-visiting this property. Fans will have to show Sony that they want a possible Sly Cooper 5 or else this franchise may be left in the dust.
