I suggest you do some math on the actual facts, and try to figure out how much money the developer is actually making on a deal, before you brand someone a drama queen. I guarantee Phil Fish knows a lot more about the facts of the situation than you do.

(And this is not to deny that Phil Fish tends to have a lot of drama. I am just saying that to anyone in the game industry this kind of armchair quarterbacking is obviously uninformed, and then seeing someone attacked / blamed / whatever due to the conclusions of said armchair quarterbacking is just pretty sad. Speaking as someone who has been through this himself on multiple occasions.)

I'm using the content of his post to make a judgement.

He made a bad deal and is blaming others. Had he not blamed Microsoft for the contract he signed I would completely understand his, very tough, decision.

"I guarantee Phil Fish knows a lot more about the facts of the situation than you do."

I should hope so! :)

>they complain about paying to be a platform exclusive.

This smells wrong. There's absolutely no benefit for the developer to release an exclusive game on a platform if the developer is paying the platform holder for the exclusive rights. The only way exclusivity benefits a developer is if the platform holder is paying them to stay exclusive.

It is not exactly that developers are "paying for exclusivity", it's that if they want to be on the platform, exclusivity is required, and fee payments are required. Basically, you have to pay to play. The reason a developer does it is because he hopes to sell enough copies on that platform to make up for the fees.

Is exclusivity required only for independent developers, or does that also apply to non-MS published titles?

It is mainly an Xbox Live Arcade thing. They know they can apply exclusivity pressure to independent developers simply because enough of those developers will cave, since indies aren't generally willing to walk away from the deal.