The PlayStation group dodged the axe that fell on Sony a few days ago when it was announced that the mega corp will lay off 8,000 employees.

The European division, at least, will not be part of the big scale down. Explains SCEE bigwig David Reeves:

We're certainly not planning to cut back in personnel at all.

Half of our personnel are in the development of the games, that's an investment. We're not scaling down at all. [...] To my knowledge, no one is cutting back on the R&D side of the projects we're working on now.

Sony live and die on the innovative projects they bring out. In our division we're still continuing to develop the products which we put in our mid-range plan six months ago, one year ago.

Speaking of long-term plans, Reeves also talks about the PlayStation 4 - or the lack of it. Taking from the timespan between the releases of the PSOne, PS2, and PS3 (around five years between each release), some may assume that we can expect the PS4 to be released sometime in 2010, but Reeves suggests different:

I'm not even sure if that's being considered. It's certainly nothing I can talk about. I have absolutely no knowledge of it whatsoever. Not even sure it's being planned

No surprise there. We don't want another "Riiiiiiiidge Racer!" happening again.

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