Unless there’s evidence that AH got a special deal, there’s no chance they didn’t know this was an eventual requirement.

I’ve been an engineer in the AA/AAA games industry for almost 2 decades, my job often involves assessing the technical feasibility of games that big publishers like Sony want to invest in/ acquire.

Someone somewhere at AW agreed to shove PSN sign-in requirements in the deal, hoping it would blow over like many games before. (e.g rocket league / epic account debacle). Now the devs are sorry it’s not working out and say “their hands are tied”, but they must have known this was coming. There are way too many legal ramifications for this to be a random power-move by Sony.