In a silent conference room, A-Zhe struggled to say the words "Our product is fine," but the uncertainty in his heart was impossible to hide. This was the seventh consecutive weekly meeting of Pixel Dust Studio with no progress, and the air was thick with a sense of frustration.

The whiteboard in the meeting room still displays the architecture diagram of their year-and-a-half effort in developing the Web3 strategy game "Stardust Fragments." Once, this diagram symbolized their passion and dreams, but now it resembles more of an unclaimed testament to failure.

The internal testing data of "Stardust Fragments" should have thrilled the team. This game cleverly combines the personalization of NFT assets with the excitement of resource competition. The innovative mechanics paired with a retro art style should have been a perfect combination. To ensure that players can trade core NFT assets at a low cost, the team chose a mature and developer-friendly EVM-compatible chain.

However, as they delved deeper into community interactions, a surprising issue emerged. Their largest, most active, and most willing to pay core player group turned out to be almost entirely loyal users of the Cosmos ecosystem.

These users are true deep players in Web3. They are accustomed to the smooth experience of the Keplr wallet, effortlessly switching between Cosmos native assets like ATOM, OSMO, and INJ on a daily basis. When they learned that the NFTs of "Stardust Fragments" were deployed on the EVM chain, their enthusiasm noticeably cooled.

In the Discord community, users ask every day whether Keplr wallet is supported, expressing their unwillingness to install MetaMask just for a game and not wanting to go through the cumbersome process of cross-chain transferring ATOM.

The mismatch between this technical choice and user needs has put Pixel Dust Studio in a dilemma. They face the difficult decision of whether to reconsider the underlying architecture of the game to accommodate the preferences of the target user group, or to stick with the existing plan and seek out a new user base.

This case highlights a key challenge in Web3 game development: how to find a balance between technical feasibility, development efficiency, and user experience. It also reminds us that in the Web3 space, users' ecosystem preferences may be more entrenched than we imagine, affecting product acceptance and ultimate success.