Its the same patreon scam everywhere. "We are adding variations to things we already have. Gonna take some time but will be worth it, trust us". After they are done with making the variations. "We are making new content but we added so many variations its taking longer and longer to make every update. We can do nothing about it now, we just have so many variations". Thus the updates take even longer with less content in them.
You call that a scam, but that's just reality. Patreon is full of small and indie devs who either didn't learn from big studios or deliberately try to go against them, because big developers avoid branching paths and variations as much as they can. It's the cost and time efficient thing to do. Branches don't add extra time to development, they multiply the required time.
In fact the last time a big developer made a game with branching paths and variations, it was called Cyberpunk and it crashed and burned on launch, because even after more than a year of delay they obviously still needed at least 2 more years to finish it.
Same here with Hreinn. Noxian Nights had no branches, choices didn't matter after the next 5 lines of dialogue, the story was linear and to the point. Likewise the development was fast and the game ended up being a lot of fun. But Hreinn wanted to try a branching structure in their next game and now we see the results.
But is it really a scam if games like KoD and a lot of others literally couldn't exist otherwise? If Nomo and Sierra decided at the start that they wanted to make things efficient and picked for example the solo-dom route, then how many of you here would have preferred if they picked another one instead?
So yeah, the development is too slow, the branches and variations spread their content thin in each patch and in my opinion criticizing that is a fair point (i also have done that), but why do you call it scam if it is the result of inexperience and design choices and not malice?