We expressed concerns about Bully Online, a massively ambitious mod that promised to bring multiplayer and a host of new systems to Rockstar’s classic school sim, when we ran across it in November 2025. It looked great, but the initial release was limited to people willing to pay for it through the mod team’s Ko-Fi page, and that seemed like the sort of thing almost guaranteed to attract unwelcome attention from Rockstar’s lawyers. Sure enough, just a month after the mod launched, it’s gone.
“The Bully Online project is shutting down. Thank you all for playing,” a message posted on the website of YouTube and project lead Swegta (via Insider Gaming) now states. The Bully Online page on Swegta’s website is already gone, as is the Mod DB page, although it can still be seen through the Internet Archive.
A more detailed message about the closure was posted today on Swegta’s Discord server. “The Bully Online project is shutting down forever, which unfortunately means all the following is going to happen in 24 hours: our official Bully Online server (on swegta.com) will be shutdown, development of scripts for Bully Online will stop, the source code will be removed from swegta.com, all our webpages referring to it will be removed, the launcher downloads will taken down, and all Bully Online account data will be permanently deleted.”
for the umpteenth time, quit making mods for games that are developed by asshats. Take Two/R* very clearly don’t want a healthy community surrounding and supporting their games as evidenced by virtually every decision they make regarding community modding efforts, stop trying to give them one; spend your time making mods for better games. Or better still, go from modding games to creating them and you could develop your vision without the constraints of someone else’s IP. But for the love of fuck stop giving time and effort to these people who will deliberately squander it.
You don’t understand. When you ask FOR MONEY, YOU are in the wrong. Bethesda obly tolerances this shit, since they are too illiterate to look further than Nexusmods.
Mods are legal, but they have to be free. Its already a grey area, having free mods along with patreon or other revenue generating sites.
no, you don’t understand, as Take Two and R* quite happily also take down free mods.
this exchange is peak internet
I’ll never get over how some people whiteknight for soulless corporations that not only don’t give a fuck about them but actively hold them in contempt, yes, the internet is a silly place.
I wonder if it would have lasted longer if there was zero money being accepfed for it. And I wonder if the source code was shared so someone else in another country could work on it.