The goal of the Game Grants is not to be a "free game" program: it's to get a bunch of great content about a game as soon as it launches, since that's when the most people will be searching for answers.
To do that, we need both great questions and great answers. Right now, the site and community are overall awesome at getting answers to questions once they're asked: the site has a 95% answered rate, and very high quality of content across the board. What the site is lagging in is number of questions. Some notable releases under the previous game grant system:
I don't know about you, but I think there are more questions in those games that didn't get asked. Maybe I'm wrong, and there really aren't that many questions about these games. In that case, they may not be the best subjects for grants.
For now, we're trying to focus on asking questions with the new grants. Maybe it will backfire, and we'll get bad questions or lots of unanswered questions. Or maybe it will result in more questions which get answers anyway because people like answering questions on the site and don't need the prospect of a free game to do it. So far the results look promising:
The answer rate for Soul Calibur 5 is worrying, but everything else looks good so far.
The current system is not set in stone -- it's just something we're trying to see if it works. If 8 questions is too many, we can revise the number. If people are asking bad questions, we might require a certain number of upvotes. If we're not getting good answers, we can make answers part of the criteria. But we want to make decisions on what's actually working and what's not working, which means trying different things and seeing how it goes.
So bear with it for a bit longer, and holler if you start seeing bad signs like low quality, unanswered, or badly-answered questions.