It's that time of the year for taking stock of how one fared during the last quarter of the previous year. NCsoft recently did that and sales and profits had dipped somewhat during Q4 2007.

How bad was it? Let's put it this way: sales of Guild Wars and City of Heroes in North America fell by 50% and 2% respectively. Sales in Europe fell farther at 33%.

Yet sales of Lineage 2 in Korea rose by 8% over the prior year. In a nutshell, NCsoft 's holiday quarter sales dipped at 45% (down to US$10.9 million) and sales went down by 3% (US$ 349.1 million) from the previous year.

Nevertheless, the company refuses to look down. For one thing, NCsoft is looking forward to the launch of its next MMORPG, Aion. The company is also banking on the growing community of Tabula Rasa MMORPG.

In addition to that, it also has a "variety of casual games" coming within the year: Point Blank, Punch Monster, Dragonica and LoveBeat.