I don't particularly have any current up-to-date skills, other than web development. In any case, I was hoping to get into the game industry through the QA department, and use it as a learning experience as to how the game industry really works. Perhaps from there I'll be able to find a better position within the industry. I've been looking on monster.com and dice.com for QA jobs, unfortunately they're all posted by recruiters and the like. If I remember correctly, those are the folks I should be staying away from, and should apply for jobs directly at the companies. I've searched around these forums, and found a few great sites (gamedevmap.com and craigslist.com). Unfortunately all of the company sites I've visited do not have any QA jobs listed. That brings me back to here. Where are QA jobs listed by companies, or are they simply not listed? If companies do not generally list QA jobs, how should I proceed? Off topic: Since I'm here, do gaming companies generally contract out to 3rd parties for web development? I've rarely, if ever, seen a game company list a web development job (including dice/monster/etc), with the exception of Blizzard. Thanks for your time.

I'm gonna kick this over to the Business forum, because Obscure and tsloper are so much better at answering these sorts of queries than I am.

My quick take on your situation will be: forget what they have listed, call them and see if they have any openings. You may also want to look at the job listings on this site, and poke around gamesindustry.biz.

I know the company I used to work at did our web-dev stuff in house, but that's usually one of those positions you don't often see advertised. Since it probably gets done by some random IT guy or web-savvy engineer, you may have a shot at an internship doing that sort of thing if you've got a killer portfolio.

There's an ACM SIGGRAPH mailing list that sends updates about graphics-related jobs every so often - they cover games, film, animation, and web stuff. You might want to look into that. I don't remember what it's called or where exactly you sign up, unfortunately, and I'm not able to access my email right now to look it up.

Also, where are you located?

Where do you live? I'm in the process of (hopefully) getting a QA job myself soon. From what I've experienced so far, yeah working for the publisher and not the developer seems like a less pleasant experience but the quantity of jobs available through publishers (like Microsoft) is much higher and is a good way to get some QA experience so that you can then apply to the studio you want to work for, and not just be another applicant off the street with zero experience.

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This is without a doubt the worst life plan I have seen in a long time.

Well that's just rude and quite uncalled for. I never said anything about a life plan. I've also read several places that QA is a great way to get your foot into the door.