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.”
what would you even do in online bully? Roleplay as pretentious teenagers? Sounds even more cringe than GTA and Red Dead RP, which is difficult to accomplish.
And to clarify, I’ve spent most of my life RPing so the call came from inside the house.
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 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.
Probably should’ve asked for donations to support their passion projects or just casually have a donate button to the side. Gamers love supporting a good passion project. See: Stardew Valley and Hollow Knight for two easy examples given how many times people have bought extra copies because it’s so good and it’s so cheap and it’ll be fun to play again on Switch/Xbox/PS/PC/Mobile/Demake/audiobook/choose your own adventure
Rockstar also kills off mods that are free. I don’t even know how exactly I’m not a lawyer. The GTA V pcvr mod is one example
Yeah, fuck Rockstar. Such a shitty company. Don’t pay for their games honestly.
as long as they keep making really good games I’ll keep buying them and playing them. if they want to be dicks about their intellectual property, that’s a bummer, but at least they’re making good games
Don’t play their games. Pirating and playing ain’t much better when they still get word of mouth and press for their games
„The initial release was limited to people willing to pay for it“
🙄
Not only stupid in general but extremely stupid considering Rockstar already made it clear they don’t like 3rd party mods when they were taking down GTA RP servers.
never attenpt to make money off any company whose trigger happy litigious. projects doa the moment you even have to consider it.
That’s probably for the best any game that glorifies bullying probably isn’t great for society.
You can’t farm clown awards for steam points here. I don’t think you get points from awards anymore from steam either.
That is the worst rage bait ever, but it seems to have worked regardless. Well done CumFart, well done.
Its funny that the game is 20 years old and people still make this assumption from the title alone.
You probably know this by now, but Bully is a remarkable tale of anti-bullying. You don’t play the one bullying others, you play the one who gets bullied.
That’s probably for the best any game that glorifies bullying isn’t great for society.
The irony of using Steve Harvey of all people to make your point…
Do you make the same argument for Grand Theft Auto?
That’s my favorite game.
So you’re a hypocriteand a prejudiced imp. Fantastic combo.
I see nothing hypocritical about that there isn’t any bullying in any of the grand theft autos.
So a blind hypocrite and prejudiced imp then?
One that’s being bullied right now by all you people who learned your world views from games that glorify bullying.
Important difference: You’re free to leave.
Never played Bully so I can say this without you thinking it shaped my world view: Just admit you’re wrong.
![Bully (released in the PAL region as Canis Canem Edit; Latin for "dog eat dog")[1] is a 2006 action-adventure video game developed by Rockstar Vancouver and published by Rockstar Games. Set in the fictional town of Bullworth, the single-player story follows juvenile delinquent student Jimmy Hopkins, who is involuntarily enrolled at Bullworth Academy boarding school for a year, and puts his efforts to rise through the ranks of the school system to stop bullying.](https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/d752d472-39e8-4515-9e64-db6f03d8893b.png)
I see, so you lied about playing GTA, don’t see any problems with virtual mayhem, but an anti-bullying game gets your inner Karen seething.
Totally not hypocritical.
Watching history repeat itself
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