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.
I think perhaps you misunderstood what I was saying. Shadowrun is not like DnD. There are no alignments. Nobody is "good" or "evil". They just do things. Those things can be the result of a variety of motivations that the actor believes to be for the greater good.
Because the game sets up corps with so much power like private armies and extra-territorial powers, it's inevitable there will be conflicts or interest. Of course corps will sometimes do things that align with your own interests, but the most powerful motivator for any entity is self-interest. The primary self-interest for any corporation in the real world or in game is profit. Things that are most profitable rarely are good for the general public, so take away oversight and lots of shady stuff is likely to happen. Smart companies will try to do very good things publicly in order to keep up public perception, so it's up to us as GMs to use that tool to make the world more real, but I think like any other NPC or PC, corps need motivations for their actions and what most folks would consider "good deeds" rarely align with the primary motive of profit.
Most of the "evil stuff" corps do in my stories are a direct means to and end. Need to get that new product out faster? Maybe accelerate human trials. Maybe those participants are willing, maybe they are unaware. Or maybe the Corp giving you a job got some intel that another Corp was doing these trials and hires you to disrupt. It's up to us not to fall into simple good v evil tropes.
I like how that sounds, but that really doesn't describe the vast bulk of cyberpunk-genre role-play over the last few decades, and believe me – I was there!
If anything, most of cyberpunk role-play has been even more behavior-tropic than D&D tends to be. The alignment system in D&D at least allows for characters to break the mold of expectation. A Chaotic Good goblin is at least theoretically comprehensible within the framework of narratives that tend to fall out of it. Unusual, yes. But allowable within the framework.
Approach most groups about how often their Johnson screws them over and you will get elaborate laughter, vast peals of it, and they might talk about the one or two instances in their entire gaming career where the corporate contact doesn't screw them over one way or another. Maybe. If you're lucky and they've been particularly lucky.
If you look at the published scenarios, all the way back to Cyberpunk 2020 but the vast corpus of the last five editions of Shadowrun as well, there are almost no examples of corporations which cannot easily be painted very broadly as "evil."
That trope is extremely widespread even outside of the specific context of cyberpunk RPGs. In fact, it's one of the main reasons that I pitched loudly and long enough to get handed the Iteration X Revised book for White Wolf just so I could get some corporate entities into RPG canon who weren't complete mustache-twiddling jackasses.
Which is exactly why I originally pointed out that it would be an excellent requirement for the players to get on board with their part of it by needing to justify, by buying into, and by explaining why the corporation that they are responsible for creating as antagonists are doing good things.
I would make that a part of every cyberpunk-genre game that I ever ran, but in particular for The Sprawl and the kind of lightweight distributed narrative power that comes in that system, that is a huge, potentially interesting aspect which actively pushes the players away from falling into the simple good versus evil tropes.
Which I repeat, are dull as dishwater.
Anything that breaks that cycle is a good thing.