Didn't watch the interview, but it seems he said 100m+:
Days Gone director John Garvin speaks to his opinion that Sony places too high an emphasis on Metacritic scores, ignoring the whole picture.
gamerant.com
The game media was unfair not only bashing the game, but also lying in reporting the interviews Jaffe did to the two directors of the game. As an example, he didn't say Sony is placing too much emphasis on Metacritic scores. The 'he described what he sees as an issue of games being developed based on Metacritic scoresn issue of games being developed based on Metacritic scores' is also a lie.
He never said that in the interview. He said that Sony higher ups were always supportive with them and their vision for Days Gone, how the game released and with negative reviews and said he doesn't know what Sony uses to decide to greenlight a game because he worked on the creative and narrative part of the game, not in the business side of the game, so he wasn't involved in the process of greenlighting the game. Specially regarding the Days Gone sequel, since he retired when released the game, and the sequel wast pitched months after that, when he no longer was there, so he didn't know the results of that pitch or the reasoning for prefering to greenlight a new ip instead.
He said that he personally thinks that a company like Sony, as in the case of a company like Disney, should always try to excel in these developments where they are spending over a hundred million dollars (again, he didn't know the exact budget of the game because that is under the 'business' part of the game and he only was involved on the creative side). So he personally think a company like Sony wasn't/shouldn't be happy with a 71 metacritic, so he thought that a creative director wouldn't continue being creative director of an IP that got a 71 MC. This doesn't mean they fired him due to the metacritic, he retired because he's fifty something years old and Days Gone took around 7 years to be developed, so considered that he'd be too old when releasing the next game, so retired before starting to work on the next one.
The other director left (but months later, after greenlighting the sequel) for more or less the same reason: in his case he said he also was around 50 something years old and prefered to ship a couple of shorter games before retiring than another huge AAA open world. So he moved to Netherrealm.
I love Days Gone, and although I'd like a sequel I'm quite content with it being one and done. Reason being its a nice self-contained story with a complete and satisfying character arc for its leads.
Too many times I see franchises getting extended past where they really need to finish; frankly TLOU2 is a great example. I understand people wanted more Joel, but the reality is there wasn't actually much travel left in his arc. Basically what we got of him in the second game was as much as was warranted. Deke in a direct sequel would have the same core issue in that there isn't much left to explore about him that's not been covered already. They are both redemption arcs and so that end-point being reached you either flip-flop them hard or just leave them as static anti-hero types, neither option being particularly compelling in my view.
This accepted, what's left are just variations on your standard post zombie-apocalyptic dystopia, which is pretty generic and played out at this point. Doing some sort of spiritual successor type of deal a few years down the line seems the right choice to me.
Even if the arc of a character is complete, any competent writer could find the way to create a new arc for a new character in a sequel or prequel.