Part of me feels like they're only saying this to try to prevent a fan-made style of the game from sprouting up due to lack of development on the IP, that being said I haven't followed one of their games since PS1, so not sure how well their fanbase is
It's already done, Driver Syndicate is a fan made driver game. There's been also a fan made PC port of Driver 2 even (I held the WR for the speedrun of that game for a bit even)