Games_and_Culture_Article_Cyberpunk2077

Dataset used in the study presented in <em>Games and Culture </em>article titled: <em>Broken promises marketing. Relations, communication strategies, and ethics of video game journalists and developers: the case of </em>Cyberpunk 2077 <br> <strong>Abstract of the paper:</strong> <em>Cyberpunk 2077’s</em> negative reception stood in striking contrast to the pre-release hype around the video game built by the producer’s marketing campaign and the gaming press. This study examines a selection of gaming websites, to consider their pre-release <em>Cyberpunk 2077</em> coverage and the discrepancies between these early reports and the released game. Using inductive conventional content analysis, framed as thematic analysis, 148 press articles were investigated divided into nine subcategories, and three categories. These articles told an almost exclusively positive narrative, promising great performance and features. The uncritical reception of publisher information by journalists allows the authors to propose the notion of “broken promises marketing”. The article contextualizes this term in the gaming ecosystem, arguing that over-optimistic marketing is amplified through features of the online press ecology. Finally, the results are considered from a business ethics perspective, with a set of communications recommendations for both journalists and game publishers. <br> <strong>Dataset description</strong>: Conventional content analysis, framed as a thematic analysis, was used to examine a selection of articles from gaming websites. The dataset lists these press materials and organizes these by date of publication and gives the authors, title, service, and web address. Articles were assigned identifiers (001 to 148). <br>