They did not know that they were for public sale, this is a strategy that I saw a lot in NFTs and I did not know that in ICOs it was also done, maybe these things are new to me, I have no experience in trading, it is good to know in exchanges what will it be, I have seen in other threads that bitcoin is at a price that is neither low nor high, and that if bitcoin goes up all these tokens and coins can go up, it is a good time for investment, other coins like BFG and The OWL has been talked about a lot and they are actively buying, the projects that the casinos are presenting seem to have more acceptance by all the investors.
That's impossible, they just said that they are doing a public sale now. If what you mean is the pre sale, that's also not possible unless if they suffer from amnesia lately and they forget the past things that they did. You said this is a strategy so maybe this is what they are doing there.
Nft's are also about selling an item same with what ico's are doing, that is why you think they have similarities but ico came first before nft's so maybe ico have this first and it was only copied by nft's later on. Many are now investing in casino tokens because those investors believe that crypto casinos are going to be more in demand later on. That's why.