GameStop sales increased 35% over last holiday
The empire of GameStop marches on and announced that for the nine-week shopping period ending Jan. 5 it raked in $2.3 billion, a 34.7% increase from the $1.7 billion made last holiday. New games accounted for 43.2% of sales, while used games made up 17.6%, the top five selling games were Guitar Hero III, Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed, Rock Band and Super Mario Galaxy.
GameStop CEO R. Richard Fontaine says software sales grew this year by 45% and the current install base of "next-gen" (now-gen) hardware has tripled, which is a positive indicator of future growth expansion domination. He says he was very pleased to see "record holiday handheld sell-outs" of the DS and PSP -- which is something we've been tipped off to already during this pre-December NPD report period. Based on the holiday news, GameStop increased its expected fiscal earnings for the year which will be announced in mid-March -- we fully expect to be blown away like Alderaan.
