I believe Thomas is working on a new forum, but I don't have any details on it. Sorry.
I agree that it would be nice to review stuff & get badges / achievements based on your contribution to the community. We used to do the same thing on my old music forum. I had a really nice review & rating system custom coded into the CMS I used by a friend - actually he made 3 systems for the forum as I wanted to separate WIP tracks, from finished tracks & tracks from mixes. All in all it worked great.
As for Steam... although I might not agree with DRM bollox (steam has everyone by the balls) I still prefer it over other services as the games are often cheap on Steam because there's always some sale or special on each week & then massive sale every few months or so. Also they have trading cards & the market system which is good for people like me that don't care about collecting cards or leveling up as we get to sell unwanted cards on the market to idiots (
) & then take the money that gets added to steam wallet (shame it can't be transferred to paypal) & use it to purchase games we want.
They also have the achievement system for achievement hunters & badge collecting for other collectors. Hell there's people on there that just collect games for the sake of collecting them - pretty mad.
Anyway, yeah... seem to have gotten a wee bit off topic here, but it's all good.
In regards to the competition stuff, it's not really to do with VS. It's just something I was thinking about a while back. MAGS itself works without the promise of prizes because they have a massive & very active community, so there will always be people that will enter their monthly competitions. We on the other hand, lack the community. We have a few core dedicated members, but mostly people that pass through or just check in from time to time.