Here is a quote from an article I was reading (I'll link to where I got it, but I doubt it matters):


"5. Corporate name Las Vegas -- This city is missing out on a ton of revenue by not whoring out its name even more than it already does. Vegas could rent out the city's name every day to a different company.

One day, we could be living in FedEx Las Vegas. The next, Nextel Las Vegas. If college football, with its corporate-sponsored bowl games, can be a whore, why can't Vegas?"

from: How to Make a Better City


This seems like just the thing that power-obsessed Mega-Corporate entities would LOVE to do. We could be running one day in the Ares-Seattle Metroplex, the next, in Saeder-Krupp Hamburg.

Because then they'd have to take care of the day to day operating costs of running a CITY. It not a good investment. IIRC, there's been some talk of this before only on a nation wide scale.

Sheesh, I must be horrible at putting my thoughts to the keyboard...

Think about it as when a company plasters their name on a football stadium. They do it for ADVERTISING. They don't actually own the stadium...sheesh.

The company pays the stadium owners to put their label on it, and the owners run it like they always do. Just instead of being called George Washington Memorial Stadium or whatever, they call it "Mitsuhama Stadium" or what-not.

Think the same thing, only with actual cities selling out their names.

"Ares-Seattle: A Runner's Paradise"

It might be frowned upon since corporations have near nation status, so it's more agnalogous to Russia-America.

Oh well, I always figured there was so little nationalism anymore (in the 2060's) that nobody would really care

I like it. I can definitely see Vegas doing this, maybe Reno and Atlantic City too.

I think one of the reasons this hasn't shown up in Shadowrun is pretty simple: It wasn't really happening when the game was originally developed, and so it's built into the history that such sponsorship doesn't really happen ... it's one of those divergent history things that trouble near-future games.

It's certainly something that I could see happening, though ... perhaps not with huge cities, but smaller cities that are always struggling for money and to create jobs for their citizens? "Sure, we'll become Ares Fargo, if you build us a new car factory!"

I was just wondering why a corp would do this when they actually own areas big enough to be cities, or the eqv. to cities (Arcologies).