A month after launch, Bully Online mod "is shutting down forever" and being scrubbed from existence as dev assures "this was not something we wanted"

A football team and red bull mascot running in Bully — (Image credit: Rockstar Games)

Bully Online project lead Swegta has announced that the ambitious mod, which added online functionality and a ton of other GTA Online-type stuff to Rockstar's cult classic, has been shut down permanently just one month after it launched. Virtually all traces of the mod and its source code have been scrubbed from the web, with Swegta strongly suggesting some, uh, outside force had something to do with the abrupt shutdown.

"The Bully Online project is shutting down. Thank you all for playing," reads an update on Swegta's official website. No other information was given, but Insider Gaming managed to dig up a screenshot of some messages that a member of Swegta's team shared to discord, and there's a little more information there. None of it is good for fans of the project.

"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," reads one message.

Swegta brushed off concerns over Rockstar and Take-Two's lawyers back in October, pointing to the fact that the mod required a legal copy of the game to work and didn't compete with any existing Rockstar products. That said, it's worth pointing out that, while a fully free version was in the books, Bully Online had a paid early access release that may have drawn scrutiny from the IP holder's lawyers. It's too early to say what happened for sure, but it sounds like we'll find out fairly soon.

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