Summary
- Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus is now the most popular classic game on PlayStation Plus Premium.
- Sly Cooper fans have shown strong support for the PS2 platformer, reigniting buzz around the franchise.
- Thanks to a sample size determined by the game's PSNProfiles Trophy data, it's clear that the player count for Sly Cooper on PS Plus Premium is impressive.
Shortly after its addition to PlayStation Plus Premium, Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus has already become the most popular classic game on the subscription service. The beloved PS2 platformer made its way to PlayStation Plus Premium as part of the service's June 2024 catalog of titles, and newly sampled player data reveals that Sly Cooper fans showed up in droves to support the game.
The last Sly Cooper game, Thieves in Time, launched over a decade ago and neither developer Sucker Punch nor PlayStation have done anything with the IP since, with the former having moved on to Ghost of Tsushima. Therefore, the surprise announcement of Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus being included as a classic title in PlayStation Plus Premium's June 2024 lineup was received quite well by fans of the franchise.
Sly Cooper on PS4 Has a Big Problem
The recent PlayStation 4 port of Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus has an issue that's been pointed out by a prominent member of its community.
Although the June lineup added three new PS2 classics for PS Plus Premium members, the support for Sly Cooper, in particular, has been surprisingly high. A new TrueTrophies report sampled 3.1 million active PlayStation Network accounts and found that the Sucker Punch platformer saw the biggest launch for a classic title on the Premium tier, outpacing the player count of previous record-holder The Legend of Dragoon by 2.5%. When expanded to encompass both the Extra and Premium libraries, Sly Cooper is now the eighth-biggest PS Plus game of 2024 so far (excluding Essential games).
Sly Cooper is The Biggest Classic Title on PS Plus Premium So Far
The report also reveals some comparative data between the recently added PS2 titles, with Sly Cooper drawing in nearly 39.7% more active players than Tomb Raider: Legend in the same week. Despite Tomb Raider: Legend exhibiting some issues on PS5, it has also done fairly well among the classic titles, currently standing as the third-biggest launch. The demand for new PS2-emulated games has grown in recent years, and PlayStation's partnership with Implicit Conversions to bring fan-favorite titles from the mega-popular console to PS4 and PS5 is seemingly paying off already.
It must be noted, though, that TrueTrophies' player data only comes from a subset of 3.1 million users, which is quite small compared to the 118 million-odd monthly active users across PS3, PS4, and PS5. PlayStation's internal telemetry may differ from the results of this report, so it shouldn't be taken as an absolute measure of Sly Cooper's success on PS Plus Premium. However, the PS2 classic title has done well to reignite buzz around the IP, and while there's no Sly 5 in the works right now, the popularity of the first game on PS Plus could prompt a reconsideration from Sucker Punch and Sony.
