GameStop Corp's sales during the holiday season topped last year's, as new products like Microsoft's Kinect motion controller revived customers' spending in its stores.

The biggest U.S. video game retailer said sales for the holiday period -- the key season for retailers -- totaled about $3.02 billion, a 5.4 percent increase from a year earlier.

Comparable same-store sales rose 3.4 percent, which came in lower than what some analysts had been expecting. Wedbush Securities' analyst Michael Pachter had expected same-store sales for the nine-week holiday period ending January 1 to be more than 5 percent higher.

Shares of GameStop fell 1.7 percent in premarket trading.

New video game software sales increased 3.3 percent -- thanks to hot titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops from Activision Blizzard . Sales of hardware like game consoles improved by 7.4 percent, thanks to the Kinect and Sony's PlayStation Move controllers.

Post-holiday sales are also significantly outperforming expectations, the company said.

The company reiterated its profit forecast for the fourth quarter. GameStop expects to post earnings of $1.53 to $1.59 a share, in line with analysts' average view of $1.56 a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Thursday's sales numbers echoed comments made by GameStop executives in October about holiday sales topping 2009's.

Microsoft said on Wednesday it had sold more than 8 million of the Kinect, which outpaced Sony Corp's <6758.T> motion-sensor controller, the Move. ID:nWEN5108

Shares of GameStop closed at $21.89 on Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange.

(Reporting by Liana B. Baker, editing by Dave Zimmerman)

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