So basically, it's a poorly marketed $40 game facing a lot of free and popular competition.

Not really surprising given how it looked (like a generic ripoff), how it's priced (should be free), and how it was marketed (every conversation I enter starts with a chain of comments saying it's the first they've heard of it).

What is surprising to me is how much a Sony first party game missed the mark. I can't think of any other recent examples.

Hero shooters rely on appealing memorable designs, compare the characters in this game with any of it's competitors (TF2, Overwatch, Marvel Rivals) and it's obvious why it failed. That combined with questionable allocation of dev time (why put so much work into the planet info and story cutscenes?), poor map design, and a $40 asking price ensured it would flop.

I feel like there's just too much competition. They would've needed some hefty marketing budget to get across why people should play this instead of Overwatch et al.

Never heard of it until now, but I figured the hero shooter genre had already died off.

First I even heard about this game was a comic talking about it's unattractive characters. I looked it up out of curiosity to see if this was an exaggeration like it has been with some characters like Aloy, and....ehhh...mostly true.

One of the big draws of these types of games is cool character designs people want to play. This game definitely doesn't have that for me. Overwatch quickly pulled me in with cool character designs, this one...does not.