Cliffski's Blog - Why valve should give jobs to journalists.
"I think if you want to keep reviews you have to accept that the only real way to fix 1) 2) and 3) is to have at least some paid reviews. If I owned steam (I’ll get this on a t-shirt one day), I think I’d take a chunk of the sales profits (steamspy suggest roughly $200 million this sale, so say 30% is $60 million, lets spend 2% of that, $1,200,000) and hire a bunch of reviewers, full-time. I’m sure the world of games journalism has a bunch of unemployed writers that would love the job. Lets pay them $60k each, with admin & health insurance and all that, we get 12x$100k reviewers. So that’s 12 full time games reviewers working for valve. Not a lot, but not insignificant. They don’t have to review all the shovelware, just the games selling thousands of copies.

Suddenly we have a bunch of ‘pro’ reviews mixed in with the wider range of existing ones. Now a big part of the problem is solved, but I’d go further and do some weighting based on another metric."