Wouldn't it make more sense for a corporation to build or at least support a government of some sort and...

Wouldn't it make more sense for a corporation to build or at least support a government of some sort and control/influence it from behind the scenes rather than assume the responsibility of a governing body itself?

No, it wouldn't.

But why though?

Wouldn't it be easier to pawn off the responsibilities of government to someone else? Not to mention if shit turns tits up you can always pretend to side with the populous side and work on the new people coming into power to keep business going as usual.

A really big company could see the government as a very small liability, so it makes sense that they would absorb their functions instead of separating from them.

It as happen in the real world, look for example at the British East India Company, at the peak of their power they had an Army twice as big as England's, and controlled more of India than them too.

But that was practically their main function ruling the continent in the place of the British Empire. Not only that you don't have to worry about silly things like PR and other nations not doing business with you (except on the sly) because of your actions.

>worried about bad PR
tell that to the people of Java

Yes, that's what they do irl

"Man behind the throne" only works when the throne is literal - when there's a patsy and a puppetmaster. When you're dealing with large organizations, having a middleman is pointless and potentially dangerous.

>Yes, that's what they do irl
For the only reason that they can't usurp the government YET.

That makes me wonder. Would a feudal style system be good if you were a large corporation with dreams of grandieur? Essentially become a modern day Borgia if you will?

From a certain point of view, a sovereign government is just a specific type of corporation, with citizen shareholders (some of whom profit more than others).

I suppose. I've been trying to reconcile some ideas about Megacorps as a government because I imagine they wouldn't want to deal with or bother with things like actually being responsible to the masses.

Read up on Neocameralism. Basically posits the sovereign corporation as a real estate holding company with a military, existing for the profit of the shareholders. The idea being that the best way to make a lot of money in real estate is to kick out the useless eaters and make your patch of ground a nice place for useful people to live.

>I imagine they wouldn't want to deal with or bother with things like actually being responsible to the masses.

>implying governments do either

A corporate ruled region would just look like any modern gov. The ones with most money and media backing hold positions. Take marching orders from donors.

No,it wouldn't.

In my mind it all comes down to efficiency - Does the corporation think it will bring more profit to shareholders by subsuming the government or not?

The next question is whether the corp wants overt or covert control.
The reasons for covert control are if overt control is considered unpalatable to local populace, local elites or the international community.
But none of these are certain to be the case.
If a nation has had a run of sufficiently bad leaders then they may welcome rule by an efficient and successful corporation.
>Maybe democracy has become such an obvious shitshow popularity contest that none of the voters have any faith in it anymore.
>Maybe governments have been so weak/corrupt/degenerate that the common man will happily accept a firm ruling corp if they at least get the economy back on track and the trains running on time.
>Maybe behind the scenes corp influence and corruption is so obvious that no one really cares whether they hide it anymore and they'd just rather focus on the latest season of Bread&Circuses2027
>Maybe the country's previous leaders were such antagonistic warmongers that the international community would quietly or openly prefer a corp gov because at least nuclear war is obviously unprofitable
>Maybe the nation's elites and the international community don't think this country in particular can be trusted to rule themselves (maybe they're skin is too dark, or they keep genociding each other) and a corp is better for everyone concerned
>Or hell, maybe the corp is just so big that they don't care. The efficiency of direct control outweighs any losses from poor morale or international pressure

And don't think of gov as some sort of inefficient waste of money. Overt gov authority is always a productive asset for a company because the government determines taxation. If the .gov branch of the corp is ever running at a loss then the execs are free to change to a more efficient method of governing or just increase taxes.

>I've been trying to reconcile some ideas about Megacorps as a government because I imagine they wouldn't want to deal with or bother with things like actually being responsible to the masses.
That's easy.
A corp wants the functions of government fulfilled just as much as anyone else. Infrastructure, law and order, healthcare, education and defense all affect productivity.
If the corp isn't doing it directly then the money is being taken out of the economy by someone else or it's not getting done.

All that needs to happen is for the corp to decide it can allocate money more efficiently for it's purposes than the existing gov or 'the people'. Maybe too much funding is going to teaching gender identity and not enough to education, or maybe public transport is optimised to take families to the beach instead of ore to factories.

In a way it's a logical extension of minimising their own tax burden. What's better than paying no tax? Controlling how all the tax revenues are spent.
Ultimately of course a one-corp crony-capitalist state wouldn't bother with tax, they'd just reduce your wage and allocate the rest of it as they felt best.

Take a look at PanO in Infinity. There, lobbying became such a problem that they got rid of politicians. Now, all businesses have lobbies for different issues that they back to different extents. Theres a lobby for weapons research, and lobby for trade embargoes, a lobby for the Christian Church, so on and so forth. Corporations directly vote for their best interest, and interest groups represent the non-corporate side of people's interests.

It's Veeky Forums. We don't care about your fucking real world political bullshit. We're here to erscape the ughly hate and discontent you people can't help but spew all over the fucking place day after day after day. We get enough of your politics, SJW/anti-SJW, self serving diatribes outside of our hobby. That's why we have this hobby. Fuck you, fuck the mods that encourage you, and fuck the things you've done to this board in the name of your self righteous crusades.

>No dystopian megacorps, that's politics.
>No feudalism, royalty, nobility, emperors, etc. That's also politics.
>No adventurer's guild. That's labor politics.
>No fantasy races or cultures. That's identity politics.
>No worldbuilding geology or ecology. That's environmental politics.
>No characters. That's also identity politics.
Veeky Forums is only allowed to talk about abstract game mechanics, physics, and math. You can discuss Go or Sudoku. Chess is banned because it has kings and queens and that's too political.

>everything is Veeky Forums
5 of the posts in this thread are game centric. The rest are just standard political discussion, which isn't Veeky Forums. What's hilarious is that you are the same people who comp[lain about SJW crap in MtG, roleplaying games, and art, and demand that if we don't get rid of it now then it will saturate every aspect of the board - just like this political bullshit thread and all the shitposts like it.

Make up your damn minds.

Yes. Many features of a government require massive resource expenditure for little profit, at least in the short-term. A modern military, in particular, does not work under a profit-driven ideology as it requires massive upfront costs with its use incurring even more costs. Even during the heyday of PMCs in the Iraq War most of them were used for bodyguard, training, and administrative duties rather than active combat. Unlike PMCs in fiction, real world PMCs, when engaging in actual combat, function as light mechanized infantry with the occasional organic air support as anything else would rapidly spiral in cost.

>organic light air support
Like trained hawks and stuff?

This is pretty much the American way. The first instinct of financial elites is total irresponsability. The a program is launched by the government to fix it. Then the financial elites accuse the government of being irresponsible. It's a lovely game and quintessentially american.

Helicopters and small planes.

>Wouldn't it make more sense for a corporation to build or at least support a government of some sort and control/influence it from behind the scenes rather than assume the responsibility of a governing body itself?
Isn't that what vast majority of cyberpunk scenarios actually propose, too? From Neuromancer past Blade Runner to fucking Alien universe, they all are based around the idea that there is an official government or governments, it's just very basic and has little actual influence over the corporations who can in practice do what ever they want.
I can't really think of any cyberpunk scenario that would have NO central governments in place what so ever right now. The governemnts are usually very ambient and not the center of attention, but that does not mean they don't exist at all.

Cyberpunk 2020 is the basis for that image. A lot of cyberpunk tropes come from Cyberpunk 2020 as opposed to the short stories.

Even CP2020 has non-corporate government. America's happens to be basically useless due to the US imploding, but the Euro-nations and shit have more functional ones.

Even Night City has a mayor and shit, it's not the mega-corps employing the regular cops.

Federal Government®, LLC.

It's not about being political or pushing one's politics in game. These sorts of things inform the settings that apply them.

In general the trope is that Megacorps are so powerful they eventually become the governing power themselves. As a kid that seems like an easy concept to accept but for me using RPGs to kind of explore how certain ideas and concepts in life work on a theorycrafting level not only helps me to understand the better (in a way that satisfies me) but also contributes something to world building. LIke the fact that Megacorps arn't simply the CEO at the top as you have the Board of Directors behind it or that groups who own all of these companies don't answer to said CEO and are often owned by Hedge Funds and such groups who are probably nebulus entites composed of a few people who don't care what the corps they own do as long as they get a ROI for pumping money into them and having them in their investment portfolio

Straight Pink mohawk is fine but some of us like a bit more substance in our cyberpunk/sci-fi

Depends on setting.