The trend in a globalist economy, where international corporations manage to grow beyond the limitations of state laws, is that you do see a small number of corporations grow to hold massive market majorities. Just look at Apple for the tech industry. Disney for the media industry. Nike for the clothing industry. McDonalds feeds 1 percent of the global population. That's insane, but it's true.
Yes. They do. See the above companies. They are pretty much cults of consumption at this point. They stand on the shoulders of hundreds of thousands of underpaid workers, and yet consumers don't care. Because those brands become part of their self-identity. Star Wars is a legally recognized religion in some countries. Disney might as well be, given how much Walt is worshipped and how many make their Hajj to Disneyland once a year. Pray to your Starbucks and Fox news every morning. Whether you like it or not, these are the new cults of fiction; cults of consumption.
Monopolies are becoming extremely common, they are just harder to detect and no one wants to regulate them. By rights, a company holds a monopoly when it takes over more than ~18% of its respective market. Many major American industries have already consolidated 80-90% of their marketshare between four-ish companies. Big Media has five. Airlines have four. Big Agro has 6. Big Pharma, Big Oil...if you don't already see this, you aren't looking hard enough.
This is true about most game mechanics. Technically the majority of mechanics developed for a game do not contribute substantially to depth, because they were more often than not conceived to increase breadth of gameplay. You didn't want cooking or fishing or gambling in your RPG, it does nothing to facilitate the core leveling mechanic, but it's there because the devs had time and wanted to either a) appeal to a broader audience or b) try out new ways to monopolize your attention. The fact is, most tentpole media is not design under a single, coherent, efficient vision anymore; it's almost always been Frankensteined together from a mishmash of genres to try to be "just enough" to more people than "perfect" to less people.
In the grand scheme of things, VI having corporations is still far less splayed across the design space than most consumer media; so far it has a fairly high degree of creative integrity so I'm not sure why you're doubting the devs before they've even had a chance to play with the concept. Maybe they can make it to your liking. Maybe in the process of testing things, they will come to the same conclusion you and I have; that having "markets/industries" is more interesting and fitting with the design of VI than "corporations."
A lot of those consolidations you’re seeing is actually because the relevant industry is declining. Disney isn’t growing because it’s all powerful. It’s growing because making movies and other media is less profitable and more risky, so you need to consolidate to preserve profitability and better manage risk.
Monopolies are tricky things. I guess you can say any market with a single player is a monopoly. But what really matters is whether there is competition. And quite a lot of monopolistic markets are actually quite competitive - the monopoly is just competing against potential competitors rather than actual ones.
You’re right - Mc Donald’s is huge. But it could lose its position very quickly. It’s not a monopoly in the sense no one can compete with it. Think of all the anti monopoly litigation around Microsoft. Total waste of time, because actually the market has done a better job of breaking up their monopoly than any regulator could (although yes, they’re still big). Likewise, before them, IBM and Kodak were practically monopolies, but again were actually very vulnerable.
If you want to talk real monopolies, look at OPEC, look at De Beers, look at the big accounting firms. They’re all monopolies not inspite of Government regulation, but with the actual complicity of governments.
Most companies don’t even really make anything. I don’t think they are cults of consumption really. They’re mostly about finance. Look, there’s lots to not like about corporations and corporate culture - and there are certainly lots of people in the world being exploited. But consumerism isn’t about companies - it’s got a lot more to do with government policy, particularly around interest rates and regulations. People imagine there’s these companies forcing governments to be slack on regulation and give companies tax breaks etc. And yeah, companies do lobby governments. But don’t kid yourself - they’re plenty in government that don’t need any lobbying, and want to accelerate consumption for a whole bunch of other reasons beyond campaign finance.
I’m not saying your view is wrong. I more saying the picture is more complicated, nuanced, and previous versions of Civ have missed this out. I find the previous takes on companies not only too simplistic but also... yeah, boring. If you try to represent companies specifically, you just end up with something very reductive.
Now. If you want to actually represent consumerism in the game, now you’re talking. Populations growing out of control. Rising demands on amenities. Furiously building factories to satisfy those demands, but then that destroying the environment. Loyalty learching from positive to negative and back again. Populations stratifying into different classes, hitting production. That I could get behind.
