My initial thoughts? Who really cares? Oh, don't get me wrong, I understand why the OP is raising the issue after the apparent u-turn with regard to this "leaked" detail, and I understand why there is a drive to get developers to push the envelope when it comes to inclusion in the first place. But honestly, two thoughts occur:
One, I don't think I ever anticipate Soul Calibur being the franchise to break new ground on a social issue. We're talking about a series whose writers have struggled to get two coherent thoughts in a row and whose plotting has essentially boiled down to "Big guy with giant stone axe hits a lizardman, and then a small girl, and then...somebody else...Darth Vader? Yeah that'll do!" Clearly VI represents an effort to collect all of those bizarre and internally inconsistent plot strands together and reform them in a story that at least has a continuity of sorts, but honestly that has made my eyes roll even harder this time around: so much development cost wasted on an endless series of generic cutscenes with mind-numbingly pointless and goofy character interactions (most of them with equally pointless tertiary cut-and-paste characters) which I (and I assume most other veteran players) are just going to skip through anyway, especially with Libra of Soul (aka NPC chatterbox mode)--all to assuage a vocal (but to my mind, really not getting the point) minority who insist every game must have a fully fleshed out story mode, and who will make a stink if it isn't present in a game they will buy and play for maybe twenty hours total (vs. those of us who will put hundreds, or even in some extreme cases thousands, of hours into the game in multiplayer and would rather the basic mechanics receive the bulk of dev attention). I didn't care about which evil artifact Yoshimitsu shattered in the middle of his quest for vengeance when I was reading about it in a blurb in SCII's bonus materials, and I don't care any more now that it's got twenty minutes of spoken exposition; in fact, I've got far less time for such nonsense in my life these days.
Actually, I had rather come to celebrate the cornball, threadbare, and thoroughly pointless nature of the plot and how it was presented in the SE-SCIV arc; it was like the game was encouraging you not to take any of the background story too seriously and to just fixate on...well, making your big man with an axe hit that Lizardman, frankly. And no amount of backstopping that story to try to make it into something more compelling is going to change it from anime-style melodrama into Don Quixote--and anyway, the only Cervantes I care about when I turn on my PS4 is the demon pirate with teleport skillz! And yes, I'll admit the last two paragraphs were a bit of hijack to gripe about the problem with VI's approach to story more generally, but I say it all to frame my perspective on the Maxi-as-a-gay issue: Soul Calibur was never going to be a meaningful platform to move the needle on the representation of any underserved group of people.
Second, even if Soul Calibur was going to do something along these lines, it would have been kind of predictable-bordering-on-offensive if it had to be Maxi. Of course our gay character has got to be the guy with the most ostentatious outfit and the highest voice, and the greatest level of obsession with his appearance ("My hair!"), who gets regularly mocked by the other characters for his sense of style. C'mon, if you're going to make a Soul Calibur character gay, be creative. Siegfried, or better yet, Astaroth ("It's been so hard to keep this secret, to conform to what people expect out of a giant murder machine golem, but all I've ever needed was someone who truly understood me--YOU MAGGOTS!")
Anyway, I kind of wonder how much the supposed leak was ever genuine. Of course it could be like the similar situation with that Beauty and the Beast remake a couple of years back, which as best I understand the reports, was built up in interviews only to be completely un-explicit in the movie itself. Basically, the developer wants the attention without facing the blowback, so floats the idea (so people who want to see it will see it when they experience the story) without actually devoting any effort to making it a part of the narrative (so it doesn't upset people who just can't handle something so trivial). That kind of attempt to have your cake and eat it too could be what was going on here. However, the references in the story modes (reproduced by Reprobean above) seem to suggest that (if this ever was in fact planned) the devs got completely cold feet about homosexual Maxi and removed this character detail either from the game entirely or just from the English localization. On the other hand, I do kind of like the idea that Maxi is living through the subplot for Captain Shakespeare (from Stardust), putting this lady's man persona on while his knowing crew indulgingly pretends not to see the truth in front of them. I can well imagine the scene when Maxi finally comes out: "Uh, yeah cap'n, we kind of had an idea. You bleach and starch your outfit every night in order to look like that even though you spend your life on the sea, at dodgy pirate ports, and on occasional in-land excursions to fight samurai and cyborgs. Also, you call yourself 'The Dandy of the Seas'; what I'm trying to say cap'n is that there were some clues..."
