Holy crap at these Days Gone numbers. This goes down in my opinion as Sony's most surprising success story of the generation. And yet they aren't happy about it. Weird.

So many games would benefit from not receiving sequels, even more endless one.

From the OP source the studio management wasn't happy not Sony. If you look at other studios interviews you'll know that Sony have their studios with a very good freedom to decide on what to work on.

If we are to believe the story of the refused pitch, perhaps it was the studio management that refused a director pitch isn't of Sony denying the studio the sequel.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/jeff-ross-days-gone-has-sold-over-9-million-units-on-ps4-and-pc.1627134/page-4

Its sold through, over 9million copies now.

"and whatnot"

nah, it wasnt the bugs, it was mainly journalists and critics, getting angry at the male role, and his attitutde towards women.
Femanists went wild, and journalistes all showed up to support them, and gave it worse reviews than it deserved.

I've been saying this since forever, its a underrated game.
Its a much better game than its review score, shows.

Apparently, word of mouth, and solid gameplay, beats journalists dogpileing on it.

The numbers for both games seem amazing.

There's a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't know of course. Like what the budgets were for the games. What kind of complications they had to go through to get the game shipped. Etc. Things that affect a publisher's trust in a development team going forward.

But if we ignore all that and just look at the surface of what we know, the major standout difference I think between them is that one launched in a state where every review I saw complained about the bugs.
Even if you had no interest in the game, it was difficult to avoid seeing comments about the bugs.

Whatever the case, sales are not the end all be all for one entry in a franchise.
A publisher will survey how many of the previous customers were satisfied and would be willing to buy a sequel, if they continue.

They are making a new IP as we speak and it's an open world game and according to them builds and expands on what they learned from Days Gone.                        

Pasted from a post I made in the frontpage article.

He referred to local management and we don't know the return on investment, those roi numbers might not have been enough for a sequel since these figures seem to have have been heavily driven by sale prices and the decision not to follow up with an immediate sequel was made fairly early on , and that is backed up by John Garvin who was the creative director and lead writer for Days Gone, he blamed the lack of full priced sales for them not getting the green light for a sequel, also some of the noise surrounding the studio and Sony seems to stem from them after completion iirc not being to happy with being tasked with helping ND finish up The last of us 2,, because management thought the game had earned them enough status to do what they wanted, still although they didn't get a Days Gone sequel they did get a new IP approved that they are working on, now all we know about it is its an open world game .

Yes a sequel was pitched, John Garvin the Creative director and lead writer on Days Gone said the lack of full price sales was to blame for the lack of a sequel.   

We need to remember that World Wide Studios base their greenlighting of sequels off multiple factors and criteria some that we are aware of but also lesser known factors,I will badly demonstrate this by using this hypothetical scenario, where Game A does well and sells x amount and a sequel is greenlit then Game B does well and sells a similar amount but doesn't get an immediate sequel, questions are raised and the answer turns out to be simply one of bad timing where game B fell into a scenario where there was a scheduling squeeze and Game A had taken the last remaining opportunity, so in the meantime game B may either be put on to help with other work or rather than wait in hope for a sequel spend the time on pitching a new game, but no matter the outcome and the reasoning behind it, to the public it is still a black and white case that doesn't add up.

returning to some of those other factors, we have factors like how well the launch phase went when the games are selling at full price, then there's return on investment not just singularly but also against other games because the investment pool being finite means that there is competition for that money , sure the blockbuster games subsides that pool enabling more games to be made Shuey when head of WWS said  that besides their development costs being returned to the pool an amount of profit was also put back into development from each AAA block buster provided funding for around 7 other games per blockbuster but the pool is still finite. so in the end the simple fact is the reason for games being greenlit or not isn't always black and white.

On David Jaffe's livestream, Jeff Ross said the local management at Sony Bend didn't want to do a sequel to Days Gone, and they didn't even push the pitch to the higher ups at SIE. It seems like the expansion of Sony Bend created tension between the old guard and new talent, which caused many of the original team to depart the studio after the release of Days Gone.