Bad things are said to come in threes, and that apparently goes for the game industry too, with news that layoffs have hit PopCap, THQ and Funcom.

For PopCap, the announced Plants vs. Zombies 2. 50 people have been let go from PopCap Seattle, PopCap Shanghai has been "shrunk", and the company is currently evaluating whether it wants to keep its offices in Dublin open. In a post on the PopCap blog, John Vechey, one of the company's co-founders, said that the layoffs were due to a combination of changing consumption habits and the need to maintain company profitability. He also added that if the company hadn't been purchased by EA last year, "the cuts would have been worse".

In THQ's case, 20 staff are being let go. In a leaked email, THQ president Jason Rubin said that the cuts were to the production and marketing units, but that "none of the development teams are effected, and we do not anticipate the reduction to have any impact whatsoever on the titles in production or the future scale of our output." The layoffs come one month after the company closed its quality assurance facility in Arizona.

Lastly, Funcom -- apparently hurt by a less-than-stellar launch of The Secret World -- admitted that it had temporarily reduced its staff, but declined to give exact numbers as the company is "currently in the middle of this process". However, according to NeoGAF and others, the number of layoffs may be up to 60% of the company's workforce.