Megacorporation

A Megacorporation (aka Mega-corporation, Megacorp, etc) is a very large powerful corporation with a lot of wealth, resources and power.

Things a Megacorp will have

• Private Armies: Large numbers of armed goons and mercenaries. These guys typically get roflstomped by whatever hero happens to be around at the given moment. May go be the names “Private Military Company” or “Private Security Company”; the former implies that the company are outright mercenaries for hire, something that most governments tend to discourage, but the latter is used more often to suggest that the company is just a bunch of fancy rent-a-cops for when you need protection for particularly sensitive operations or you need to do business in a chaotic environment.
• Company Towns: A town where everything is owned by a company. You not only work for the company here, but you also live in company housing, eat at a company canteen, drink at the company bar, shop at a company store, send your kids to a company school, etc. Usually, you're paid in company scrip (coupons that are good at company facilities) and the prices are high. Company towns are most commonly set up at resource extraction sites (ie mines, oilfields, etc) that are far away from existing towns. One of the big flaws of company towns is if they're a recession, employees who are laid off or have their hours cut won't be able to afford continuing to live in the town, which can create many problems such as strikes, or having the whole town turn from an extra source of revenue to a massive money pit as what happened to the Pullman Community.
• Sub-Divisions: A Megacorp will have its fingers in a lot of pies. Often it will try to control as much as its supply chain as possible to reduce costs and it will acquire things it deems useful. For example, owning your own logistics company is very useful if you're heavily involved in any sort of commodity or mass manufacturing.
• Fixers: People who can sort out issues for a Megacorp that they'd rather not do overtly. This ranges from spying to engineering scandals for their rivals to assassination. Usually these are independent contractors and as such deniable assets.
• Holding Company: a company whose primary existence is to own stock, but does little actual economic activity on its own. Holding Companies as business entities can own a huge variety of different smaller companies, usually by gobbling them up through mergers and acquisitions. If a Megacorp is structured as a pyramid with all the individual businesses at the bottom, the holding company would be at the top. Because of just how monolithic and entangled the chain of business hierarchy can get, it may actually be difficult to find out who owns what or who’s actually in charge - which may be by design.
• Monopoly: what happens when a Megacorp acquires effective control over an entire industry. This is usually bad since no competition means the corporation has no incentive to put out a better product; they’ve captured the market and can do whatever they want with near-impunity. A near-monopoly can exist if only a handful competitors exist but they all agree to coordinate their actions, controlling the market for themselves and keeping any newcomers out, effectively creating a cartel instead.
• Lawfare: the MegaCorp’s most common tactic for getting people to do what they want. Lawyers are too expensive for the average person, so they’ll use their own lawyers to threaten you with cease and desist letters / get you to sign a contract full of obscure legalese / force you into a hostile takeover / sue your ass into oblivion, and most people will fold under pressure even if they’re in the right.
• Corporate Speak: A Megacorp that's trying to bamboozle the general public/investigators/investors/its own employees will do everything it can to present the image it wants to project, or at the very least, hide its dirty laundry as much as possible. They tend to do this with obfuscating language and meaningless jargon. Expect any press release to be full of half-truths, buzzwords, and lofty but vague language. This also extends to any creative pursuits, which end up being as inoffensive and soulless as possible.
• Illegal science projects: Megacorp are the future, and thus they will always making the first step for humanity through the field of science and technology, even if it is illegal as fuck. To research anything can be costly and time consuming, and the executives are greedy fucks, and so they would researching and experimenting if it could results in advancing their products, helping them making more money, or they are bored and have extra money to treat it as some sort of pet project (if the CEO is a mad scientist with absolute power). Depends on the type of Megacorp, the research subjects can be illegal as fuck (not that is matters to them since Megacorp are above the law), it could be anything from medical (which they do away using human experiments to produce new types of drug, if not to play gods and evolve humanity. See Resident Evil), food (which they would engineer new unhealthy artificial ingredients then sold them on market for massive profit), even illegal subjects like weapons (making big money by selling them to war torn countries), cloning (fear of salmon extinct so you can't taste them anymore? there's now more of them! but they don't taste the same anymore...).

IRL Megacorporations

• The East India Company (EIC): One of the early wave of corporations founded in 1600 to trade with India, the EIC gradually took over the entire Indian Subcontinent. Of the IRL example ls the EIC is the closest to a fictional mega Corp by dint of have a foreign policy of a sorts and its own standing army, again of a sorts.
• Standard Oil: Came to dominate the American Petroleum industry under J.D. Rockefeller. Eventually got broken up later in the 20th century when the federal government realized it didn't like corporations having too much power.
• Disney: Skub depending who you ask, but Disney is without a doubt one of the largest companies on Earth with wide financial assets. Started as a humble animation studio under an ambitious man that has evolved in a corporate media giant. Owns one-fifth of the media outlets in the United States.
• Amazon: Not as skub as Disney. Amazon started as a book delivery service that eventually evolved into general merchandise delivery and has even created a niche as a media provider, having acquired MGM and adopted The Boys and Man in the High Castle into shows. Infamous for their quick delivery times, terrible worker conditions, and are currently under investigation from the state of Illinois for possibly cutting corners on warehouse safety that resulted in a high number of deaths. Also tied for leading provider of fandom lore rape with Disney due to The Rings of Power.

Megacorporations in Tabletop Games

A staple of the Cyberpunk genre.

• Arasaka:
• Militech:
• Weyland-Yutani:
• ComStar:
• Saeder-Krupp:

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