In Shadowrun, the megacorps are very political and have way more power than in the real world. It's easy to envision the pulling some shady stuff and hurting people.
Of course; it's easy! It's a staple of cyberpunk literature across the genre. "Corporations are evil!" might as well be the battle cry for every single cyberpunk story ever written, with very few exceptions. This includes everything out to the edge of the Dark Conspiracy novels written by Michael Stackpole.
But at a certain point – that becomes a really tired trope, and I think we passed that point almost 20 years ago. It was fresh in the 80s. It was usable in the 90s. By the mid 2000's, it was getting a bit shopworn. At this point…
It's kind of dull as dishwater.
Not only that, but it really takes the fangs out of any kind of conflict between corporations, from the perspective of the PCs. If the only reasonable response from them is "a pox on both your houses," then there is no interesting decision-making to be had. The only real choices to minimize collateral fallout around them while you let the designated bad guys punch each other until one of them falls down, then finish taking apart the loser.
So rather than make the assumption true, better gameplay can come from subverting the expectation. Make the players, specifically the players, advocate for at least one corporation. Have them justify why it exists, why it continues making money, why people continue working for it, why they keep putting their lives on the line fighting against the runners to keep the place safe. Make them advocates of part of the setting.
Then, when corporations do terrible things, somebody, somewhere, has to come up with a reason that it's happening. There needs to be a motivation. Maybe some middle manager has decided to go off the reservation and do things "his way." Maybe it's a top-down directive to change how things are done, but then you get to ask "why was that directive put in place?" Maybe it's not the corporation at all but someone trying to frame them. Or maybe what's happening isn't what's being portrayed as happening.
Now there's a lot more interesting material going on in the world. Now you have people at the table who care about why these things are happening and what the fallout will be afterwards. All it takes is getting them invested.
Many of the best stories are only tangentially about corps themselves, but they make compelling villains because of their power.
A good villain – the best villain – always has reasons for what they do. Sometimes those are good reasons, which makes them the hero of their own story, fighting against painful necessity. Sometimes those reasons are bad, because they've been misinformed, which makes the story of tragedy. Maybe the reasons are bad because they simply want something different than the protagonists and the desires are driven by equally valid concerns – just different ones.
Letting the players get away with "corporations are always evil" as the default mindset to go into the game with, especially for cyberpunk settings, is lazy and really robs the players of a lot of experiences that they can have at the table which would be mine glowingly different.
Sure, the default expectation for a Shadowrun or is that they be a gun for hire who doesn't give two craps in a whirlwind for anything that's not a local concern of theirs. But there needs to be more of a framework for them to hang bits of their story on, for them to care about, and all too rarely – and especially in cyberpunk stories – we just get remix after remakes of the "uncaring loner who is just doing a job" for the "I'm just going along with the rest of my team wants." We don't get enough affirmative character connections, but those only really start with the player being connected to the setting.
That's what I want more of.
RE: Running The Sprawl: First impressions