"You have what you wanted on your PC, now pay to enjoy it." is a very malicious way to interpret this. I'm not robbing anything from you, nor do I deny you access to something "you have". You don't have it, you're window shopping.
I just got here, so I'm not sure how you distribute your game, but I took this in a very literal manner.
As in, he literally has your game sitting on his hard-drive, but can't access it without a password.
Honestly, I can see that being more frustrating than simply having the download itself being behind a password, because you already went through all the effort of actually downloading the file only to be cockblocked after having already technically obtained the thing you were trying to get.
To
use mangle your window shopping analogy, you saw something you wanted in the window, the cashier boxed it and gave it to you. (for free, even!)
Except the box is locked, and you need to pay for the key.
It frustrates something primal way back in the caveman part of the brain/
You're free to take your locked box and just
go though. You can't do anything with it, but you can put it in your car and drive home. Maybe stick it in the attic along with the rest of the junk that you'll never get around to throwing out.
If you want to actually open the box and 'get' the thing that's already sitting in your hands, then you've gotta pay the dude.
If it was the other way around, where the patreon password is something you typed into a download site in order to be able to actually begin the download (rather than something you put in after the download is complete) then people wouldn't compla- No, I can't even finish that sentence.
People would still complain anyway, because complaining is the natural state of humanity, but they'd have less to actually complain
about. Or at least less complaints of substance.
That said, i totally understand you wanting to abide by the Terms of Service. It's easy for me to say 'lots of H-games get away with it, so you'll probably be fine' but it's not my arse on the line here, is it?