It’s not looking good for Sly Cooper fans hoping to see the character return on PS5 via Sly Cooper 5. Today, Facebook announced the acquisition of Sanzaru Games, the makers of the most recent Sly Cooper game. While it’s possible Sony Interactive Entertainment has tapped or will tap someone else for the game, the most likely candidate to bring the series back would have been the newly-acquired Facebook studio.
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Under Facebook, the developer will become part of Oculus Studios, and continue to make virtual reality games for Facebook like it was. In other words, nothing is really changing other than the fact the studio is no long doing contracted work with Facebook, it’s simply owned by the social media giant.
Sanzaru Games — thought to be around 60 developers — was founded in 2006 and notably developed The Sly Collection and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time for Sony. Beyond putting its stamp on the PlayStation series from yesteryear, it’s perhaps best-known for its recent VR game, Asgard’s Wrath, which debuted last year to acclaim suggesting it’s one of the best VR titles to date.
As you may remember, back in December, Sanzaru Games’ Matt Kraemer talked about Sly Cooper, and the team’s desire to return to the franchise.
“We love Sly,” said Kraemer while speaking to Kinda Funny Games. “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.”
Kraemer 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.”
Again, while it’s possible Sly Cooper will live on with a new developer, it doesn’t looks good the series, at least at the moment.
