The man has an earnestly twisted view of the F2P model. Like, the levels will be behind an actual paywall then.
Tony, you fucked up.
It seems like they're planning on following through with their plans for THPSHD. With that they were planning on releasing additional locations through DLC (as well as adding revert). But it seems those plans fell through when the game didn't turn out to have the success that they were expecting. So, I expect them to give away a handful of locations and then charge for everything else.
That's horrible. Feels like enough time has passed that the world is ready for a decent THPS too. The one glimmer of hope is that the crappy F2P garbage it will turn out to be provides a good amount of unintentional comedy, in line with the other recent offerings.
They've just been chasing trends for a long time right now. From open world, to forcing motion gaming into the series, and now a mobile push. The open world worked to some degree, although I think the series was at its best when they just had smaller stages where they put a lot of care into them, but the success (both critical and commercial) was there so that can't be denied. THPS set the trend for action sports games. And instead of coming up with something that could possibly reinvent the series, they're just trying to chase whatever is popular at the moment.
I guess the biggest problem is that Neversoft is no longer making them. They're now a CoD studio. So, the people that really know the series can't make it anymore.