After a pretty short run (the blog only soft-launched in December 2006), Om Malik has posted on parent site GigaOm revealing that "...we are putting [his company's game blog] GigaGamez on hold."

Malik notes: "With our current focus, it was one of our blogs that just didn’t catch fire. That blog struggled to get out of first gear. Some might suggest three months wasn’t long enough to make that site work, but the numbers were telling us: hasta la vista baby. So we are now back to the drawing board, rethinking and re-tweaking the focus of the blog, to see if we can bring it back."

And indeed, the Alexa stats show that GigaGamez struggled to make it past even little ol' GameSetWatch, which is a resolutely non-pro 'weird stuff' editor blog at this stage. On the other hand, Malik's New Teevee, which launched at the same time, is doing much better, it can be easily seen from the Alexa graph.

Personally, I was a little disappointed that Om didn't give the newest editorial team - which included Alex Handy, Blake Snow, Raymond Padilla, and Jason McMaster, overseen by head Second Life cheerleader Wagner James Au, time to evolve. That second staff iteration had been in place only since February or so, I believe.

But GigaGamez was definitely a bit confused about whether it wanted to cover broad business, opinion, or consumer stories, or much more specific things. It's notable that the announcement post trailed it as "...focus[ing] on the business of games, online worlds and other related sub sectors of the business" - which actually seems like a 'everything' mandate, rather than a focus.

In any case, a great deal of the writing on GigaGamez was intelligent, and it was hardly an effort to be ashamed of. I think there's room for at least one more professional game blog out there - but probably as a Joystiq and Kotaku competitor, not as whatever odd business hybrid Om and friends were going for. But - anything is possible!