A Large Dataset of Video Game Patch Notes

Video games are complex and heterogeneous software systems that integrate diverse media artifacts and involve multidisciplinary development teams. Patch notes (developer-authored summaries of game updates) offer valuable insights into how games change over time and how gameplay is refined. In this research, we present a large dataset of patch notes extracted from the Steam platform, one of the largest digital distribution services for games. As Steam does not systematically separate patch notes from other news and announcements related to a game, we define a data extraction and filtering pipeline that processes over 145,000 games available via the Steam API. In total, we identified 1,085,168 patch notes from the 1,873,879 collected news items. The resulting dataset is enriched with game metadata to support future analyses by facilitating sampling and clustering. We document the methodology, provide the dataset and scripts for reproducibility, and discuss potential applications of the resources.