Bully Online shoved into a shutdown locker, as the modders behind it say that's "not something we wanted"

A group of modders who got multiplayer servers running for Rockstar’s schoolyard mischief simulator Bully late last year have suddenly pulled all traces of their creation offline. The project’s been shutdown about a month after release, and thus far its creators haven’t offered an explanation as to why, beyond emphasising that this outcome wasn’t what they hoped would happen.

“The Bully Online project is shutting down forever,” reads an announcement which popped up on the Discord server of project lead and YouTuber Swegta yesterday afternoon. “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.”

As you’ll also be dutifully informed if you head over to that website, Swegta’s set to make a statement about the shutdown on January 21st, with this looking set to come in YouTube video form. Outside of that, all the mod’s team currently said regarding the reasoning behind the shutdown in that Discord post is this: “For now though, know this was not something we wanted.” They added that Bully Online players had 24 hours from the announcement going live to hop on, take a final stroll in the mod, and backup any screenshots they want to keep.

While we’ll have to wait and see if the YouTuber’s full statement confirms as much, the whole thing smells very much like some Lionel Hutzes have been in touch and politely delivered a message amounting to ‘please knock this off’. Rockstar and Take-Two have a lengthy history of dishing out such things to modding projects, even if the company’s general stance on modding has grown a bit more complex in recent years.

If that is the case, it’s sad to see a mod that sounded when I first heard about it back in November like it’d been in the works for a good while meeting such a rapid demise.