Shadowrun may work as its own alternate timeline that starts at least as far back as 2012, but if someone were to try to align what we know in late 2024 with the setting, getting the incriminating “paydata” and sending it to some corpo media (or some rich failson narcissist pocaster) wouldn’t do much… and even if somehow the desire was there to get out what Damien Knight was up to (which was probably not as bad as 
at least in the books as written), all an Ares Macrotechnology corporate citizen would have to do is say “FAKE NEWS!” and keep on keeping on, going bazinga for the latest New Exciting Retail Product like always.
From a gaming perspective, it might be fair to give the writers some slack because if they were really honest with the conclusions of the world they had designed, the only realistic win-state would have been a successful uprising
The game had those too; the Second Great Ghost Dance was largely successful and a lot of First Nations got their land back.
In Cyberpunk RED, the impact of a Media’s report is largely independent from being true. Having hard evidence is like a +2 bonus to your d10 IIRC
They also wrongly assumed that people would try to off billionaires and other ghouls, that’s why they introduced dragons as hard to kill billionaires.
The Shadowrun timeline actually splits off in 1989 when the first edition was published. The USSR didn’t fall, 9/11 and its aftermath didn’t happen etc. That’s not to say the universe makes any kind of internal sense (although “this is just how white American dudes from 1989 who like hermetic esotericism to an unhealthy degree saw the future” makes tons of sense from an outgame perspective), but i’ve learned long ago that trying to write a “realistic” alternate timeline for Shadowrun isn’t exactly an easy task, especially when you want to still arrive at something that’s recognizably Shadowrun while also weeding out the more problematic undertones of the setting like the racist brainworms behind the portrayals of Japan and Aztlan or how they gloss over anything outside of
with “i guess it’s poor and most of the people there died from VITAS.” When we’re being realistic, we know perfectly well who’d be hit hardest by a pandemic that kills off a quarter of the world population. You can work that all into the setting, but at that point you may as well run with an original idea and turn that into a setting, it’s just as much work and less headache.I’d like to run a homebrew setting with similar vibes but less colonial-brained liberalism, but the brand recognition makes it challenging to get my tabletop group interested.
It was hard enough to talk them out of D&D and into Pathfinder.
I decided to instead just make up a post-apocalyptic / cyberpunk / pirate setting with vampires and run it with Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but the group i got together for that couldn’t agree on a set weekday for playing and then i realized i smoke wayyyy too little weed nowadays to actually write something like that.
Once, I tried to run a Star-Wars-Like with energy swords and space magic but with the magic cops not there and a lot more blatant swashbuckling, but too many people wanted the brand labeling.
