Bully Online, the ambitious mod that brought multiplayer and more to Rockstar's classic school sim, shuts down a month after launch: 'This was not something we wanted'

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."

The dev team has thus far stayed mum on exactly why the mod was so suddenly deep-sixed, but said a forthcoming video from Swegta will get into the details. "For now though, know this was not something we wanted."

That said, I reckon we can figure out the broad strokes: The complete annihilation of the Bully Online mod, including removal of the source code and an all-but-explicit statement saying the team was forced into it, absolutely screams cease-and-desist letter, very likely of the heavy-handed sort. Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive had a reputation for that sort of thing back in the day, at one point reportedly sending private investigators around to modders' homes to, uh, talk to them about it.

Which isn't to say they have anything against mods in particular—in fact they seem quite enthusiastic about them, under the right circumstances. Rockstar bought the makers of the major FiveM and RedM mods in 2023, and have now launched its very own official mods shop.