Then don’t act coy about wanting to make games as if that’s the driving force behind you being CEO of a studio.
Buddy, you need to grow up; unless you're a trust fund baby, nobody gets to dedicate a significant amount of their life to doing anything without also finding a way of making money at it. Trying to create a fun game, and running out of money halfway through development, and having to layoff all your friends and cocreators, gets nobody anywhere.
Be honest and say "yeah, we have contractual obligations and this is one of them, sucks that they are mismanaging it but we have to abide by it because they gave us a bajillion dollars, and we gotta keep the lights on. Hopefully they’ll change their minds.”
That is basically verbatim what he has said.
The reality is that they mismanaged this severely, they should have either held off the launch or made it abundantly clear that this was temporary and it would have been mandatory in a few months, not whatever the fuck this was.
The reality is that Sony probably didn't care until Helldivers was a massive success and they've suddenly started caring.
Yes there are pros and cons to both, but that does not mean they are the same or equal.
Renting inherently adds an extra middleman to the process, (someone still has to buy it), who is incentivized to rent-seek and drain everyone from as much of their money as possible.
Renting really only works in scenarios where you have a bunch of different rental companies to drive down costs, but now you're starting to get back to the original problem of duplicating everything.