Sounds like a bunch of buzzwords to make it sound like anything other than simply money was the case for why it's exclusive.
Because MS is publishing the title, it's obvious that money was sent Insomniac's way. But also, Insomniac wanted to retain IP rights to the game. Had they not cared about the latter, this would've been PS4 game. Insomniac may have been able to find some other publisher, but knowing they wanted to keep the rights to the game, I speculate that MS came to them, that way they obtain an exclusive game from a "Sony studio" (quotes around it due to them not being owned by Sony, but they are extremely tied to Sony) and sway some gamers from that audience. Win-win for Insomniac and MS. Insomniac doesn't have to seek out a publisher and can therefore get right to making the game (and keep the rights to it) and MS gets a Sony-ish game to try and persuade Sony gamers who like Insomniac games to buy an Xbox.
But Insomniac doesn't have to give us all that mumbo jumbo about how they needed XBL to make the game modes. "8 players traversing an open world with randomized missions" doesn't sound like anything more complicated than strike teams doing missions in Destiny or people getting together to play Borderlands 2. That's just PR nonsense to avoid "they paid us"
