A PC mod that added online gameplay to Rockstar’s 2006 school-exploration title Bully was abruptly taken down on Wednesday, roughly a month after it was first made available. While the specific reason for the “Bully Online” takedown hasn’t been publicly discussed, a message posted by the developers to the project’s now-defunct Discord server clarifies that “this was not something we wanted.”
The Bully Online mod was spearheaded by Swegta, a Rockstar-focused YouTuber who formally announced the project in October as a mod that “allows you and your friends to play minigames, role-play, compete in racing, fend off against NPCs, and much more.”
At the time of the announcement, Swegta said the mod was “a project me and my team have been working on for a very long time” and that early access in December would be limited to those who contributed at least $8 to a Ko-Fi account. When December actually rolled around, though, a message on Swegta.com (archived) suggested that the mod was being released freely as an open source project, with a registration page (archived) offering new accounts to anyone.
That source code has now been completely removed from Swegta.com, along with any webpages referencing the project or offering downloads for the mod’s custom launcher. On Discord, the team said that development of any Bully Online scripts would stop and that any account data created by users would be deleted.
Mods for me, not for thee
Swegta promises that a “proper statement” on the Bully Online situation will be coming on January 21. In the meantime, onlookers are left to speculate about why Bully Online was specifically taken down while other legacy Rockstar multiplayer projects like San Andreas Multiplayer have not been affected.
Rockstar’s current modding policy says that the company “generally will not take legal action” against mods that are single-player, non-commercial, and respect third-party IP rights. That policy does not apply to “multiplayer or online services,” though, or projects that make “new games, stories, missions, or maps,” two clauses that would seem to apply to Bully Online.
In 2015, Rockstar banned the developers of the popular FiveM mod for Grand Theft Auto V, calling it “an unauthorized alternate multiplayer service that contains code designed to facilitate piracy.” By 2023, though, Rockstar had officially acquired the modding team behind FiveM and updated its policies to be more lenient toward certain types of creative roleplaying mods.
Now part of Rockstar, the FiveM team has just this week rolled out a new curated digital storefront for roleplaying mods in GTA V. While that’s not exactly a replacement for the now-defunct Bully Online project, it certainly does seem primed to be more lucrative for Rockstar itself.
Volvo EX60 nasce all'insegna dell'integrazione con Google Gemini