Days Gone PS5 PlayStation 5 1

Update: We thought this story was perhaps over, but apparently not. Since conducting yesterday's interview with David Jaffe, director Jeff Ross has posted on Twitter: "I stand by my numbers."

At this point, we're probably never going to know how many units Days Gone sold unless Sony explicitly tells us. Not that it really matters: Sony Bend has moved on to a new franchise now.

Original Story: There was the outrage, and now there’s the clarification. Earlier this week, PlayStation fans were in uproar when director Jeff Ross revealed Days Gone had sold over eight million copies on the PS4 as of his time leaving the company in December 2020. He hypothesised that the Steam port had probably added another one million players to the title’s total, which would surely put it close to 10 million units sold by now.

This number was revealed at the same time as Sony celebrated eight million units of Ghost of Tsushima sold, and it was portrayed in such a way that the platform holder had done Deacon St John’s debut dirty. As is often the case with stories like this, though, the truth is not quite as dramatic.

In fact, speaking on Twisted Metal creator David Jaffe’s YouTube channel, Ross clarified that his source for the “sales numbers” was a defunct website called Gamestat, which effectively tracked Trophy data to calculate a rough number of players. In this instance, used copies, PS Plus versions, and rentals would all contribute to the eight million figure. The true number of sales is likely a lot lower, even if the game was clearly still successful.

He also added that it was not necessarily PlayStation’s top brass that balked on a Days Gone sequel, but upper-management within Sony Bend itself. Ross did refer to “local management” in his original post, although it was assumed this was referring to some kind of regional manager within the PlayStation Studios framework. Apparently, the studio never even elevated the follow-up’s pitch to the likes of Shuhei Yoshida and Hermen Hulst, who would ultimately make the final decision on greenlighting it.

As you can imagine, this puts an entirely different spin on the story.

[source youtube.com]