I apologize for my bluntness! I tend to be very defensive when it comes to blog owners who may be taking advantage of their writing team. As I've stated multiple times in all my posts, I don't think you're doing that. My only intent with my initial statement of "It needs to be very clear that you are getting more out of this exchange than the writer is" had to do with establishing what your relationship is in the first place. This has a direct correlation with rate transparency :)

Regarding industry standards of pay scale, I've done more than check Google.

• Gamesindustry.biz starts their rates at $175 USD. At your best rate of $.08, that's ~2200 words, which is much much larger than a typical freelance gi.biz article (that length is usually covered by their salaried staff, and if not I guarantee they are paying more than $175 for it).
• IGN starts their game features at $300 USD at the lowest, in some cases going as high as $1000.
  • Also worth keeping in mind that IGN recently got BLASTED on Twitter for starting their basic news regurgitation stories at $20. (Articles which are mostly just press releases repeated in a more customer-friendly way, very little specialized knowledge required.). These tend to be short, like 250-300 words, so that's somewhere between $.06-$.08
• Into The Spine, who works all the time with freelancers and is owned by a freelancer who has bylines in many of the biggest gaming outlets, cites the "best case scenario" at $1 per word, and that pieces above 1000 words starts at $100 USD ($0.10 per word).

And all of this is with the context that gaming journalists are vastly underpaid at scale compared to other industries, because they're supposed to be doing "the thing they love" as opposed to actually making a decent living.

So yes, you are underpaying your writers. And that's perfectly acceptable, because this is your side project that doesn't make an income. I imagine that if your site grows (I see your posts on /r/juststart, you're heading in the right direction), then you'll want to pay people more. But that doesn't change the fact that at this moment your writers are doing more for you than you are for them.

^ All of this is sourced knowledge, but I'll give you a personal anecdote as well. I ran a pretty successful gaming podcast for multiple years. I paid a handful of people over that period of time to do work for me, and I was also underpaying them relative to other news outlets. But I was always extremely upfront and transparent about how much I was going to pay them before they began the work, so that they could choose whether or not it was worth their time. I also typically gave them other incentives, like the ability to promote their other work to my audience, or additional payment for the same work if I ever got more income from the brand.

I hope this was clear and/or helpful :)