The rumour is Neversoft (Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero) are rebooting Crash. No idea where I read that rumour - I think one of the official console magazines had it in them.
The obvious problem for Crash, Spyro and any platformer franchise like that is just nowadays they can't sell that much. Last gen, the million sales each Sly Cooper, Ratchet and Clank and Jak and Daxter game got were fine, but with HD consoles higher costs, if a genre / style of game can't get far beyond a million it's not going to happen - hence why Insomniac are pretty much focused on Resistance now and ND on Uncharted.
You'd think they could do something really cool with Crash or Spyro on the Wii (What with Mario kicking arse n all), but even Sonic, who has far more appeal then crash / spyro, doesn't get much beyond a million there. So I guess the answer is this sort of game just doesn't sell like it did in the PS1 days :(.
However! Sly Cooper 4 was 'announced' in the Sly Collection so this type of game isn't totally dead. Maybe it's just going to migrate to something like the NGP, where the game can be produced on a smaller budget to make financial viable - but is no longer hindered by lack of a camera controlling analogue stick. I reckon that's where Sly Cooper 4 is so hopefully that's a trend or something. I'd love to see any of them return though, but it's hard to see how they could make them as good as we want them to be and sell enough copies to make it viable.
