It sounds like your deities have more motivation to broadly control belief than to be worshipped.
Both natural and explicitly constructed mythologies often include polytheistic gods who seek worship. Natural mythologies tend to chalk this up to deities desiring services from mortals, simple vanity, or a paternalistic bent on the part of the deity. Constructed ones, however, sometimes present mortals' belief in or devotion to a deity as directly providing that deity with power. Arguably, this is metaphorical and represents the power gained by the institution as its ideas dominate, but still, you don't see much in natural mythologies about gods explicitly NEEDING their worshippers. In the Gospel of Luke <PERSON> claims that God doesn't need worshippers, saying he could "raise up sons for <PERSON> from these stones." (Luke 3:8) (Though, this claim could be representative of the turn from tribal deity to monotheistic God.) Still, particularly if you delve into the mythologies constructed for games, some constructed mythologies really do at a nuts and bolts level have gods that are utterly dependent on the worship of their followers and will die without it.
But, that doesn't sound remotely like anything you have going on. Your gods are powerful technologists. 72
Their motivation for controlling the belief of the masses is to prevent anyone else from climbing the ladder of technological advancement and threatening their position. Worshipping "the gods" directly is not necessary to this end: any old religion that enforces some ideas that prevent the discovery of the microscopic world will do the trick. Say glass is a demonic substance so people never make microscopes, or never trust them if they do. Make a nomadic lifestyle a religious obligation so cities never form. There is no end to the variety of imaginable religious notions which might hamstring technological advancement. In fact, <PERSON> argued that the idea of an exclusive "scientific method" is just such a religious notion.
The X factor for your gods is that they only know how to conceal the ladder they themselves ascended. If an alternative history of science could reach the apotheosis machine (a kind of "could a mermaid ever build a radio?" question) your gods depend on, trying to keep budding sentients down without exterminating them might just be a fool's errand. 693