This is the stupidest crap I've read in the last few months and represents an absolute low point in the "journalism" industry. The developer himself says there is no deal. Sony, who are not shy about making deals like this, afaik didn't even have the title in a SoP/Showcase, nor is exclusivity mentioned at the end of any trailer for the game on the Playstation channel.
Even with a title like Honkai Star Rail, a few weeks and months after the PS5 launch, it was written at the end of a trailer that the title would be console exclusive for a certain period of time. Why the hell should Sony be so secretive about this title now? They're not paying millions for exclusivity just so the title doesn't come out for a dead system that was already selling poorly. What kind of drugs is Tassi on? I'm used to nothing else from IGN, the biggest Xbox trolls ever work there. I'm pretty sure their source comes neither from the developer nor from Sony, but from Team Green.
The fact that they obviously don't want to tell fans that their crappy Series S is the reason why they can't play the game makes more sense than Sony paying money and not even marketing it. Funnily enough, it was the same with Baldur's Gate 3. Jez Cordan didn't want to accept that Sony didn't have a deal, but he claimed it until the developer made it public why the Xbox version was being delayed. And even then Spencer and Team Green denied everything, which pissed the developer off and almost canceled the port. Only then did Spencer give in regarding the co-op split screen, which was then deleted for the Series S.
Since the announcement of the Series S, developers have said the console is poorly designed. At IGN, a Remedy employee made critical comments about the Series S before the launch of the PS5/Series, and for months we've been hearing over and over again that the RAM is the bottleneck of the S (and in some cases X) - when will the American "journalists" finally accept that and stop spreading fairy tales that nobody can verify? It's not enough that idiots like Dreamcastguy from YouTube get pushed into my recommendations, now I have to put up with this nonsense.