Well obviously not, you need a lot of staff and resources to make a big game like any sequel to Days Gone would be expected to be.
This all feeds into the point about if you want to see a sequel, waiting on it to hit the sales isn't helpful.
The basic economics are that if you have a studio full of salaried employees and contractors, then you payroll spend is going to be consistent irrespective of whether they are working on a project or not. If half the staff have nothing to do, then you need to find them something productive to work towards as soon as possible.
This isn't a simple thing because what you're dealing with is not a homogenous group of people with generalized skillsets. Most of the staff are going to specialise in a single discipline with their value being dependent on their position within the organizational hierarchy. You can have the best creatives in the world but unless they know what they are doing they can't contribute meaningfully.
Losing talent is never a good thing, but that's what happens when big teams are stuck with nothing to do. Its not just the big-bad suits letting people go to save money, its individuals realizing that career damaging gaps are forming on their resumes, or worrying about their job security and deciding to jump to greener pastures.
Either way, the end result is when the next real project comes around the studio isn't ready. Too many gaps in important positions0, too much retraining/reorientation/team-building left to do... And if the studio isn't ready why would you greenlight them on a major deal?
Long story short, if a project is seen in the short term as a failure, regardless of its performance in the long-run the damage has already been done. The train has become derailed and its hard to pull it back on its original tracks.