EA is no longer the Worst Company in America, officially

Chris Morris

Forget March Madness -- another tournament is underway, and it just had a huge upset.

After earning the dubious title of "Worst Company in America" from readers of The Consumerist for the past two years in a row, the publisher was knocked out in the first round of voting.

Who took out the one seed? The ‘honor’ goes to Time Warner Cable, who received 51.2 percent of the voting in its first round matchup compared to EA's 48.8 percent. A tight race, sure, but one EA is certainly happy to have lost.

Time Warner Cable's pending merger with fellow derided cable company Comcast is undoubtedly what pushed it over the edge this year. The Consumerist notes that even EA trouble launching online games like SimCity and Battlefield 4 weren't enough to sway voters.

EA, of course, has been working to fix its image problems after capturing the title for the past two years.

EA chief operating officer Peter Moore, in an open letter to gamers after the 2013 designation, admitted the company could do better, but said the label of "worst company" was undeserved.

"Are we really the 'Worst Company in America?,'" he asked. "I'll be the first to admit that we’ve made plenty of mistakes. These include server shut downs too early, games that didn’t meet expectations, missteps on new pricing models and most recently, severely fumbling the launch of SimCity. We owe gamers better performance than this. … But I am damn proud of this company, the people around the globe who work at EA, the games we create and the people that play them."

With EA's ouster, the video game industry is in the clear for this year's list, as no other gaming company made the brackets. Time Warner Cable has some viable competitors, though. Among the quarter-finalists on The Consumerist's list are Monsanto, Koch Industries, Ticketmaster, Bank of America, Sea World and TWC's corporate fiancée, Comcast.

EA, not surprisingly, did not mark the 'defeat' with any public comment.

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