Your players are already telling you what they want, split across Steam discussions, a Discord server, app store reviews and whatever email address is in your store page. VoteFirst is a feedback board: one page where players vote on what should come next and one changelog where they see what shipped. It does not replace Discord or Steam discussions. It gives the requests scattered across them a single, countable list.
What a request looks like today, without a board
A player posts an idea in your Discord's suggestions channel. A different player posts almost the same idea in a Steam discussion thread two weeks later, worded differently enough that a search would not catch it as the same request. A third emails your support address. Nobody on your side can add those three up, because they live in three systems that do not talk to each other, and a reaction emoji on a Discord message is not a vote, it is a reaction that scrolls out of view the next time the channel is active.
Where each channel actually stands
| Discord suggestions channel | Steam discussions | Spreadsheet or Trello board | VoteFirst | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who can take part | Anyone in the server | Anyone who owns the game on Steam | Whoever you give edit access to, or nobody but you | Anyone with the link, no account needed |
| Are votes counted | Reactions on a message, not a tally; the message scrolls out of view | Thread replies and upvotes on the thread itself | Only if someone updates it by hand | Yes, one count per request, visible next to it |
| Duplicate requests | Not merged automatically; a search finds some, misses differently worded ones | Separate threads for the same idea, never merged | Merged only if you notice and do it yourself | Players see existing requests before posting a new one, so duplicates are easier to spot and vote on instead |
| Telling players a thing shipped | A message in the channel, gone from view once the channel moves on | A forum post, same limit | Whatever you remember to update | A changelog entry, and an email to every signed in player whose own vote is in that release |
| Cost | Free, part of running a Discord server | Free, part of having a Steam store page | Free to low cost, depending on the tool | $9 a month on Lite, one project, fourteen day trial with a card asked at signup |
When the channels you already have are enough
If your player base is small enough that you read every message in the suggestions channel and remember most of it, a board is not solving a problem you have yet. A Discord suggestions channel with pinned rules and an active moderator, or a single well read Steam discussions thread, does the job for a studio that can still hold the open requests in its head. The signal to add a board is not a player count. It is the first time two players ask for the same thing in different words and you do not notice they are the same request until a third player points it out.
What VoteFirst does not do here
There is no Discord integration and no Steam integration. The board does not post into your Discord server, does not read your Steam discussions, and does not run as a bot anywhere. It is a link: a public web page players open on their own, the same way they would open your store page. A studio whose whole community lives inside Discord has to ask players to click out to a separate page, and that is a real cost, not a detail to skip past. If your players will not click a link outside Discord, a board will sit mostly empty and the suggestions channel is still doing the actual work.
How a studio runs it week to week
Post the board link once, pinned in the Discord suggestions channel and in a Steam discussions announcement, and point to it instead of asking players to keep re-posting ideas in both places. Nothing a player submits goes live until you approve it, so a first troll post or a duplicate does not sit on the board waiting to be noticed. Players vote without creating an account, so someone who plays your game but has never signed up anywhere can still vote the moment they land on the page.
A player who wants to know whether their idea already made it onto the roadmap can check the board instead of asking in Discord again. Move a request to In Progress only once you have actually started it, and to Completed once it has shipped, because a roadmap with everything stuck In Progress for a season reads as a studio that is not running it.
When a patch goes out, publish it as a release in the changelog. That one action does two things: the changelog page becomes a page you can link from your patch notes anywhere, including Discord and Steam, and it sends an email to every signed in player whose own vote is attached to something in that release, and to nobody else. A player who voted without creating an account gets no email, because an anonymous vote leaves no address behind. If you want players to hear directly that their request shipped, voting under an identity is what makes that possible.
If your game is on iOS
If you ship an iOS game, the same board can sit inside the app itself through a Swift package, drawn natively rather than loaded as a web page. Feature voting inside your iOS app covers what that package does and what it costs. There is no Android SDK for it.
What VoteFirst does not do
No Discord integration, no Steam integration, no bot anywhere. No SAML or OIDC, JWT only. No Slack, Zapier or outgoing webhooks. No AI features anywhere, on this plan or any other. No Android SDK, the native option is Swift for iOS and macOS only.
Questions a studio lead asks before setting this up
Can VoteFirst post into our Discord server or read our Steam discussions? No. It is a web page players visit directly. Pin the link where your community already is, in the Discord suggestions channel and in a Steam discussions announcement, rather than expecting the board to reach into either one.
Do players need an account to vote? No. A player can open the board and vote without signing up. Voting under an identity is only needed if that player should get an email when the thing they voted for ships.
What happens to duplicate requests from Discord and Steam? Nothing merges them automatically. The board does give players a place to see existing requests before posting a new one, which makes it easier for a player to vote on an existing request instead of opening a fourth copy of it, but a studio still has to moderate for duplicates the same way it already does in Discord and Steam.
Is this instead of a Discord suggestions channel, or alongside it? Alongside it, for most studios. The channel is where players already talk. The board is the place their requests get counted instead of scrolling away.
What does it cost for one game? $9 a month on Lite, one project, with a fourteen day trial and a card asked at signup.
What this costs
Lite
$9 /mo
Pro
$39 /mo
Lifetime
$999 once
Fourteen day trial of Pro, card asked for at signup. Nothing here counts the people who vote, so the bill does not move when the board starts working. The long version, with what happens if you stop paying.
Other use cases
Feature voting inside your iOS app, for a studio shipping on iOS that wants the board inside the game itself. Anonymous voting, for the full trade between letting anyone vote and knowing who voted. Feedback board for indie hackers, for a one person team running the whole thing alone.