How is this a more effective way to bootstrap a player base than, say, handing out drops on twitch or having seasonal item packs up for free for a limited time

How is this a more effective way to bootstrap a player base than, say, handing out drops on twitch or having seasonal item packs up for free for a limited time on the store (i.e. "Until Nov 1 you can get the Halloween cosmetic pack for free on steam if you own our game"). In all the cases I can think of tying your promotion to an NFT that needed to be earned in a different game is purely going to lower the number of people that this promotion will apply to while not at all lowering the cost in terms of dev time & art (because while an NFT might indicate a Santa Hat you actually need to build that item as an art asset in your game and make sure it's compatible with models and clipping and all that junk). I feel like most of the NFT arguments I've read in this thread are assuming that somehow using an NFT gets you out of the cost of actually spending the art & dev time on producing the cosmetic - just because it exists in another game doesn't make it appreciably any cheaper to add to your game. I will admit there are ways to make art more "valuable" by actually limiting the number of available copies - but that trendiness is hard to effectively harness. Beanie Babies took off in the 90s and everyone's brother started buying up newly released ones... almost all of which were worthless because they scaled up their production to meet demand - and if they hadn't they wouldn't have been easy to get a hold of.