I'm getting sick and tired of idiots that resume every failure in the game industry with shitty non-arguments like that.
The diversity shit he included certainly won them no favors but you have got to be a colossal idiot to believe that alone or majorly makes the opinion people have.
The truth of the matter was that there was plenty wrong with the game on it's. So much wrong that the agenda pushing means nothing in comparison. You had a full weekend to try out the game and see this for yourself if you at least understand a little bit of game design so you have no excuse to spout dumb shit like this.
Someone could come along and make the exact same game but with bodacious babes and scruffy muscle men and it would still sell like shit.
And here's why:
The game game featured both projectile based weapons and hitscan weapons, when a lot of the action happens in very large open fields. You can still airshot someone with a bazooka, but the difficulty to do so makes it a severe handicap when you could pick any hitscan class and still achieve roughly the same TTK.
There were closed interior areas that apparently were well suited both for the heavier and slower classes as well as the projectile based ones.
The problem is that they had multiple openings and were still quite spacious so an Assassin or Wraith would enter from some random angle you couldn't see, do their shit and leave before you fired a single round. And since you're not the primary damage dealer if you're playing one of these classes, you're not gonna kill anyone unless they willingly choose to stay in the same room as you, which they never do.
The Medic class was a joke. Healing was just sending out bots (just like Zenyatta's Orbs) so most of the time you were just shooting grenades. Your jetpack gave you some decent mobility but nothing to special.
The Assault class with a minigun and a jetpack was the best designed idea on paper with the worst implementation possible. Your minigun gets more accurate the longer you fire and you regain charge in your jetpack by damaging people.
So in theory, you start shooting someone and you can actually give chase with increased accuracy.
In practice, you'll start chasing someone that so far you haven't done much damage because of the inicial accuracy and when you finally reach him, you are out of ammo and out of fuel, ready to take a shot in the face while you're reloading.
Finnaly, there's the class balance that was adressed by Cliffy B as "Yeah it's unbalanced, we don't care" and here's why you fucking care about balance in multiplayer games:
The Cowboy class had a hitscan charged weapon that could one shot the weaker classes and 2 shot the remaining from any distance. And a sidearm with rapid fire for anyone getting near. And Blinks for extra mobility.
Everytime one of them reached a 0G area, people would drop like flies and anyone going near would eat shit.
Even worse than this guy was the Wraith. To give you some perspective, as time progressed in the beta testing, more and more matches started to featuring more and more Wraith players to the point that matches later on were full on 6 Wraiths against other 6 Wraiths because that's how good they were and how shit everyone else was.
-Triple Jump\WallJump that resets when you land (The Assassin has cooldowns on his grappling hook, this fucker doesn't)
-Slide for speed boost
-Can throw an explosive knife for massive burst damage or leaving a mine
-Pretty decent close range damage with pistol and melee
-COULD FUCKING ONE SHOT LOW HEALTH TARGETS WITH MELEE
You'd see one of these fucks coming near you jumping from a nearby wall, you'd be unable to hit a single bullet on him, he'd jam the explosive knife on you, slide in your direction while firing and finishing you off with a stab.
Shortest TTK in the entire game, not even the Assassin could match it, especially since the Assassin had less life and cooldown on it's movement abilities.
That's why the game fucking failed. Not because of agenda pushing or unisex bathrooms.
It's because it was a fuckton of "cool ideas" that were implemented horreoundously by someone that doesn't understand the first thing about multiplayer shooters (especially since his previous titles were Gears of fucking War). The unbalanced classes, the terrible maps, the characters with no character, all of that made a forgetable impenetrable experience that nobody could be fucking arsed to sort out in order to actually play.
And no Cliffy, your game isn't hard. It's just too stupid for people to actually handle.