[Update: We've picked a winner! Congratulations, mahunoy! Everyone else: thanks for the best wishes. Here's to five (hundred?) more! Now, enough playtime. We've got some news to report on!]

Earlier this week, Joystiq turned five. Five! That's half a decade of daily video game reporting. That's over 38,000 posts and over 1.5 million of your comments. That's up from over 27,000 posts last year, and less than a million comments! Let's put that in perspective: even lowballing the average word count per post at 100 words (for example, this post is 339 words) that's nearly four million words! How does that stack up? If Joystiq had been a monthly magazine, and if you consider a standard printed page to be 250 words per page (spoiler: game magazines aren't 250 words per page), each issue would have been over 250 pages, with no images and no ads. And we're lowballing here! And that doesn't include comments.

So what? This is all to say, "Thanks!" Thanks for reading the site today; this week; this year; or this half-decade. Thanks for supporting our unique flavor of game journalism. Thanks for taking us to task when we get it wrong and for sharing when we get it right. Thanks for being interested enough in video games to read about them every day, multiple times a day, and for staying engaged.

So, what better way to say "thanks" than to give you free stuff. Introducing Swag Saturdays – every Saturday, we'll be donating something from our pile of free stuff to you, the Reader. Slow week, it may be a shirt for an iPhone game. This week: A superhero c-c-c-combo pack for your PS3, featuring both inFamous and Prototype.

Again, thanks!

-Love, Team Joystiq

Rules after the break!