I mentioned it somewhere already, but stardew valley, pretty much a much better version of this but without porn, was made by just ONE guy in FOUR years, without any crowdfunding. As has been many pretty impressive indie games. People vastly overestimate how hard it is to make a lot of these games, and those that are more complicated, are actually usually using whole chunks of asset store or free code and assets to speed things up and cover the insane amount of patchwork the 'creators' made 'their' 'game' out of, with their actual contribution often mostly being just the thread holding it all together. So no, people aren't just throwing the word scam around, most of those, especially that receive any kind of sizable funding, have more than one person working on it and don't have a finished product in five years or less (probably more like 2-4 years) ARE a literal scam. Don't believe me? Go watch some indie game dev diaries of just how much a person actually wanting to do something, even with no prior experience and no financial backing can achieve in a fraction of the span of time these games take with very questionable results, if any.