I had come up with a very clever word, playola: the gaming version of payola, the practice record labels paying for radio airtime for their label's songs in the hopes of boosting sales. Playola, on the other hand, referred to paying for paying for positive reviews of bad games, as made famous by Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann for his firing from GameSpot for giving a bad review to a new game from site sponsor Eidos.
I say had, because I was ready to call out Revision3's gaming show Co-op for giving an offensively positive review to the PSP knock-off port of Assassin's Creed. I would have made this calling out based on their uncommon apologies for universally unlikeable things, like ridiculous loading times, bad controls, the convenient ignorance of horrendously repetitive "two-song soundtrack" (paraphrasing G4), bad voice acting, and a generally uninteresting plot. It's all the more suspicious when taken in context of Revision3's product placement policy.
But I'm much, much more interested in Valve's experiment into performance-and-democratically-based policy of patching in rewards into games. Never mind that Team Fortress 2 stopped being relevant on a mass-market scale two years ago - Valve gets crazy props for continuing to tinker with the game, and getting experimental on top of what's already an experiment into perpetual revision of a game post-release. I wonder if their experimental psychologist has anything to do with it.