It’s not so much honesty as much as trying to stem the bleed.
A CEO has a fiduciary obligation towards maximising the profits of the shareholders of his company first.
Another comment here said how they needed money and expertise from Sony to roll out a game that could support concurrently the number of players they do support and how Sony is collecting their dues.
However, the fuckton of hate that’s being piled on now goes at least partially on to the developer which puts a wedge in the previous alliance.
As a developer, because of the demands of the publisher, they’ve gone from a position of such extreme good will that they had only blue skies in front of them - heck they could have crowdsourced their next game with ease and people would buy it sight unseen, meanwhile I bet Sony would be considering buying them to become in house studio, MS has a history of scooping such studios also - to revulsion and betrayal.
It also opens up a strategic vulnerability for a different developer to white knight the now proven market.
That’s not good news for the shareholders and future prospects and the CEO is trying to stem the bleed without pissing off the publisher. Seems pretty tame to me.