Surprising me (and quite surely many others), GameStop announced itself to be above recession by revealing that the nine-week 2008 holiday season broughtin 22.3% more cash than that of 2007. The retailer scored $2.85 billion in the 2008 holiday season, compared to 2007s $2.33 billion.

The five best-selling games during the period were reported to be Call of Duty: World at War, Guitar Hero: World Tour, Gears of War 2, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King and Wii Fit.

Thankfully, new video games made up 43.8% of those sales, with used game products taking up 19% of the sales; new game hardware accounted for 23.8%.