Wyrmwood’s bitter medicine is proving hard for audiences to swallow

EDITOR’S NOTE: After Rascal informed Wyrmwood of the planned time of publication as a deadline for a response (making it clear that the piece would still be updated with the response, whenever it was received), Wyrm Lyfe published a 27-minute video on December 13, titled “Here We Go Again…” responding to our reporter’s questions rather than responding to us directly. The video starts with the assumption that Rascal would twist or undermine the statements Wyrmwood would send. Rascal decided to publish this article as originally written. We will address the video directly should we conclude it merits a response.

On December 6, 2024, Wyrmwood Gaming, a woodworking company best known for their flagship Modular Gaming Table and once-regular sponsor of Critical Role, posted a ten minute video on its reality show-style YouTube channel, Wyrm Lyfe, titled “We Laid Off 50% Of The Company.” The video follows CEO and co-founder Doug Costello as he walks into a large room in a warehouse where the Plant Manager has already broken the news to the remaining employees—the “survivors.” Costello makes his way across the crowd and stands at the edge of the meeting. After the Manager emphasizes that this would need to be a time where people would have to train people and work on machines they might be unfamiliar with in order to make up for the lost employees, Costello takes the floor. He explains that his “theory” that would’ve led to things being “wavy gravy” did not hold out and that meant taking a “bitter medicine” of restructuring and layoffs. As people shifted awkwardly from one foot to another in the background, Costello spoke for five more minutes, telling people that he was going to wring “every ounce of production” out of them for their own good. Then, he said, “We lost some really good people today… people that should not have had layoffs were laid off today… and I want everyone to just keep that in mind as we move forward, cause I will.” Then turning to the camera, he smiled, clapped his hands with finality and said, “Okay, that's it!” 

This was the second of three videos that the company had posted across three  consecutive days (unusual for a content channel that typically posts once or twice a week). On December 3, 2024, they published a video titled, “This Is Not What We Wanted.” It opens with Costello, stretching out his arms, yawning, and saying, “I have to restructure the company.” Then, he says, “Everybody thinks the boss is the boss because they’re called the boss. But it’s not true. The boss is the marketplace.” He explains that the company is staffed to produce $600,000 of product a week, but they only sell half of that. Inventory is piling up. Then, the video cuts to a business meeting with senior management where Costello gives a brief financial history of the company (something he also does in an earlier video, “Wyrmwood Is Taking A Turn…” which predates the layoffs by about six weeks according to time of posting). While Wyrmwood has achieved 30 million dollars in revenue per year for the last few years, Costello estimates that being halved in the next year. Then, after a discussion of profitability and cash flow, the team begins to discuss how the layoffs must happen. The HR manager proposes that it needs to be done in person, one on one—to be humane. Costello responds, “I'm fine either way. Just me talking personally, I'd almost feel more awkward and pissed off in a one-on-one setting… Fuck, there's a bunch of layoffs—like the last thing I want to do is actually go sit down and talk to the person one-on-one and all this bullshit.” (In the response video, Costello stated that around 10-20% of the employees did request a one-on-one.)

This isn’t the first time that the company has laid off workers around the holiday season. Almost exactly one year ago (before Christmas again), they uploaded a video on their platform featuring two managers discussing layoffs. The tone is sombre and introspective. One of them even starts crying, recollecting how one of the fired employees, seeing his distress, offered him comfort: “That’s not how this is supposed to play out. You’re not supposed to be consoling me as I’m walking you out of the building, saying you don’t have a job.” The comments on this video are, by and large, extremely sympathetic. 

The reactions to the most recent layoff videos are not.

Some were angry at the layoffs. One person wrote, “Unsubing (sic) and crossing MGT off my dream D&D room list. Layoffs right before the holiday is inexcusable while giving shareholders 1/3 of company profits. This company lost its humanity.” This wasn’t the only comment that mentioned unsubscribing but it was in the minority. Other commenters were still critical though: “I’ve been laid off 3 times from factories throughout my career and this was the absolute worst way to do this” ; “I hope this video stays up so this can all be stored as a case study in how management can really fuck things up”; “To the remaining workers... UNIONIZE”

Many were horrified at the existence of the video at all: “How awful of a speech it was aside, and it was absolutely awful, this should not have been a video. Transparency should not come at the cost of decency.” Another comment reads, “Forcing the employees to be on camera during this is on another level of insensitivity. Honestly in shock at how disgusting this is.” 

Although published last week, the layoffs happened in late November. The first indication for most of the company that mass layoffs were occurring happened in the Wyrmwood Discord, where the employees were sorted into two different roles. One group was told to come in for a meeting at 3:45, the other at 4:15. The earlier group of around 80 people was dismissed en masse. According to multiple sources, one woman who was let go was sobbing in the hallways, asking if people knew where she could post a tent–losing her job meant she was going to be homeless in New England at the start of winter. (The response video confirms this.)

Officially the criteria to keep someone was listed on the whiteboard in the video “This Is Not What We Wanted,” as skills, attitude, and history – a set of standards repeated to the managers. In the video, however, Costello additionally says that he wants people to analyze their direct reports by “skills, attitude, and how much it would fucking suck to lose them,” a much more subjective standard than “history.” He wants people who “are culturally aligned with us. When I come into work and I see them at work, I smile.” He continues, encouraging the managers to “be human” and allow their own personal loyalties to partially drive the decisionmaking in order to avoid “becoming mercenary” in business. One other thing to note on the board under the heading titled “Restructuring Process” is the fourth main point Costello wrote on the board: “I have final call.” Elucidation on this point did not make it into the video. (In the response video Costello confirms this was the case.)

Wyrm Lyfe is not without its previous controversies. In 2023, following the publication of a now-delisted video titled “Wyrmwood Responds to SA Allegations,” the public comment mirrored a lot of the backlash seen today–viewers were left confused by not only the content, but the delivery, and the video started a cascade of responses. Gaming institutions Take This (a non-profit dedicated to destigmatizing mental health through gaming) and Dispel Dice both distanced themselves from the company. Lin Codega  (one of the authors of this article), writing for io9, published an investigation into the allegations, which reported on the experiences of over 50 current and former employees of Wyrmwood at the time. Based on that report, the company launched an internal investigation which ultimately found no evidence of wrongdoing. In the December 4th video, the investigated employee was promoted to Chief Marketing Officer.

To date, the company has delisted 400 videos according to screenshots available on Reddit, including a recent video on tariffs which featured a giant smiling picture of Donald Trump as its thumbnail. In the video, Costello states he is broadly pro-tariffs across the board and would steadily introduce them so as to boost domestic manufacturing while avoiding “economic collapse”. He also adds that if mass deportations happened, it would drive up wages and prices for customers. The video also features an employee from Pennsylvania being asked how the election went. When he says that “it went well,” everyone in the room roars with laughter.

Since 2023, Wyrmwood has added a disclaimer at the bottom of the Wyrm Lyfe videos that attempts to deny the veracity of the videos and discredit the statements enclosed, saying that some of the personalities may be “amplified” by the camera for the sake of entertainment, that Wyrm Lyfe “doesn’t represent the values, working environment, official marketing, or brand identity of Wyrmwood,” and that “any remarks or actions that imply or indicate non-compliance with any law, statute or regulation are being made for purely comedic purposes.” (This was potentially added due to episodes of Wyrm Lyfe that contained incidents such as Costello saying “safety slows us down” while having past OSHA citations on the books.) This disclaimer wasn’t present on the three videos about layoffs at the time of writing this article.

After Rascal News reached out to Wyrmwood for comment, they published a video titled, “None Of You Know What You're Talking About.” In the video, Costello hits back at viewers for their hate, criticism, and their “reddit-level analysis” of the situation. Costello stated that delaying the layoffs past December would've only led to more layoffs and that he would like to hire back 25-50% of the laid off staff if the company's circumstances change. He stated that he didn't find the video insensitive and wished more companies displayed such transparency. He also reveals that he isn't running Wyrmwood for the money and could retire from his investments in Bitcoin if he wanted. There is no mention of the fact that most people in the comments were bothered by the way he handled the situation, rather than the way Costello handles business. The stark difference between the reception to the video from this year and the one from 2023 makes this clear. 

Costello states that putting everything online in an act of “radical transparency" is beneficial to the company and to their subscriber number. (They mention in the response video that roughly 200 people have unsubscribed since the layoff videos.) The disclaimer at the end of the ten minute video, which is largely concerned with berating its audience for not understanding how serious these decisions are and how a business works, ends “like most things on the internet, you shouldn’t take Wyrm Lyfe too seriously… We certainly don’t.”