“Can’t I just say what happened?” A tall man in a flat cap asks, looking around the sparse meeting room. “Isn’t truth an absolute defense?” This is Doug Costello, the CEO of Wyrmwood Gaming. “It is,” says head of HR Bas Antoine, “if you have the whole story.” The two go back and forth, brainstorming a response, Costello repeatedly looking into a camera as he dramatically recounts allegations of sexual assault. “The person who was allegedly raped never worked at the company,” he says, eyebrows raised. “I don’t know her name.”
The scene is from a fourteen-minute video titled “Wyrmwood Responds to SA Allegations,” a record of a group of men discussing what to do about recently-surfaced allegations of sexual assault at their company. Throughout the video, Costello makes statements like: “You have to get police involved.” He mentions alcohol as a factor in the allegation. In part of the video, Wyrmwood’s lawyer, Frank E. Biedak, gives the go ahead to share the video on their YouTube channel, alongside a written statement.
Wyrmwood Gaming is an unusually transparent company; while its core business is making luxury wood products for tabletop gamers, including dice trays, deck boxes and gaming tables, its executives seem equally concerned with the production of Wyrm Lyfe, a YouTube-based reality show focused on their daily activities at the company, filmed with handheld cameras and uploaded two to three times a week.
The program has over 100,000 subscribers, and fans usually reply to new videos with praise or earnest questions. But the sexual assault discussion was not Wyrmwood’s usual content. Comments on YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter decried the video as a “tone-deaf” and “harmful” way to handle serious allegations. Several corporate partners, including Dispel Dice and the mental health organization Take This, announced they would end their relationships with Wyrmwood. The company took the video down from YouTube in less than two days.
In a statement addressing the allegations, Wyrmwood said: “We take any allegation of inappropriate conduct, including, but not limited to, sexual assault, sexual misconduct and safety issues, very seriously. We consider the safety and well-being of our employees a top priority. To that end, we’ve made very significant investments in HR and Safety and will continue to do so.”
But after io9 reviewed a saved copy of the video and began to investigate, it became clear this incident is emblematic of a company that appears to prioritize the image and ego of its executives over the people who work for it. Over the course of this investigation io9 spoke to nearly fifty sources, including current and former employees, who shared stories that included allegations of rampant misogyny, bullying, dangerous working conditions, and sexual harassment and assault.
Doug Costello declined to respond to these allegations via phone or email; he invited io9 to visit one of the company’s shops, but we were unable due to time constraints. io9 offered to interview any representative of the company as an alternative; Costello declined to pass the offer along. The only current executive of Wyrmwood Gaming who spoke to io9 on the record for this article was Bas Antoine, head of HR.
While Wyrmwood Gaming wants to convince audiences that it’s just a cool bunch of goofballs doing their best, there’s rot at the company extending deep into the heartwood of its structure. At its center: co-owner/co-founder and CEO Doug Costello.
Wyrmwood Gaming is a Taunton, Massachusetts-based wood shop and manufacturing company that produces luxury gaming furniture and accessories. Established in 2012 by brothers Doug and Ian Costello, the business was based out of a hobby woodshop in their parents’ barn, and sold its wares at local gaming stores. Within months, the pair teamed up with local gamers and woodworkers Eric Dupuis and Ed Maranville.
In October 2013, Wyrmwood launched its first Kickstarter, to fund the construction of handcrafted wooden dice vaults. The campaign completed after 27 days, having raised $84,460 from 1,423 backers. (To date, Wyrmwood has successfully completed 24 Kickstarter campaigns; its latest, concluded on March 17, raised $1,923,029, with more than 5,000 backers making $299 deposits for tables that could cost anywhere from $1,700 to upwards of $10,000, depending on wood and configuration.)
Soon after, Wyrmwood expanded to a mid-size shop, then to the current location in Taunton, and most recently by purchasing Keystone Furniture in Pennsylvania to act as a finish shop.
During every growth spurt, Wyrmwood experienced growing pains. John Savage, a woodworker who was at the company for three years starting in 2015, recalls that increasing production to fulfill Kickstarter orders showed a “lack of planning… [management] told us we would be able to make a product in a certain way and then when we tried to bring it to scale, we would find major flaws in the production.”
“Doug is the type of person that throws stuff at the wall, says co-founder Eric Dupuis. “He fundamentally doesn’t believe in competency.” In an episode of Wyrm Lyfe, after Costello boasts that his skillset is in entrepreneurship, not “managing a large company with proper financials,” Wyrmwood social media manager turned reality show producer Bobby Downey chimes in, saying “and we’ve been faking it pretty good.” Nobody contradicts him.
In 2020, Wyrmwood’s Modular Game Table crowdfunding campaign became one of the most successful fundraisers Kickstarter ever hosted, bringing in nearly 9 million dollars and hugely increasing demand on the shop. During this period of rapid development, and while dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, the company jumped from 50 people to nearly 120, and expanded into a second shop location in Pennsylvania.
It was during this transition that Wyrmwood brought in Mike Saltzman, who began to take over a lot of the executive day-to-day operations of the job. Saltzman declined to speak about the problems at the company due to contractual restrictions, but said in a written statement to io9 that he left shortly after joining the company, following an argument “that highlighted significant professional differences, primarily between Doug [Costello] and myself.”
Despite the high-pressure environment, many of the employees of Wyrmwood–the people making the dice trays and towers and vaults and tables–said they loved their jobs. “I wanted to be an owner at one point,” said Savage, speaking about how much he enjoyed the work. “I still have friends there.”
That attitude can be traced, in part, to how Wyrmwood hired a bunch of nerdy gamers to make beautiful, nerdy gaming products. It’s also a result of Wyrmwood recruiting from within the extended circle of friends and family that already worked at the company, creating an intimate and tight-knit workplace.
But employees say that today, that sense of camaraderie has gone missing. “Working there is like being in a cult,” one former employee said, describing how they felt about their former colleagues. “Pretty much [everyone who works at Wyrmwood] are great people,” stated another former employee previously in middle management, “But let me just be blunt about it. I like everyone at the company except for Doug Costello.”
The first outside indication that something was wrong inside Wyrmwood came in 2020, when Doug Costello publicly resigned as CEO after a conflict over COVID safety measures. The incident blew over fast, and Costello returned to the position in 2021.
More troubles became public in early 2023, when accusations of sexual assault at the company began to surface on Twitter. These accusations went viral in gaming communities, as Wyrmwood Gaming is a recognizable name and they had just begun their 23rd Kickstarter. A few days later, former employee Andrew Overbeck said on Twitter he was the whistleblower, and he had been fired by Doug directly. Then Wyrmwood Gaming released their video about the situation.
But this incident is not the only allegation of misconduct made against Wyrmwood employees. io9 spoke to multiple people who allege they have been assaulted or harassed by former and current employees at Wyrmwood Gaming: One of these sources retracted their statement out of fear of retaliation, but two others attest that head of media Bobby Downey had sexually harassed them while they were either employees of Wyrmwood or involved in a business partnership the company. Downey did not respond to io9’s request for comment.
One alleged victim, a former employee in Wyrmwood’s woodworking department who asked not to be named, recalled an incident that occurred in 2019 after she’d been casually flirting with Downey, but then decided to break it off: He was her indirect boss, and a part-owner of the company, so she didn’t feel comfortable pursuing a relationship with him, she said. After a few days of giving Downey a cold shoulder, he insisted they meet up. When they were alone, according to the source, Downey unzipped his pants and exposed himself. He took his penis out and asked if she was “going to leave him with blue balls.” When the woman refused, he asked if he could take care of it himself. The woman, not knowing what to do, said yes. He masturbated in front of her, dropped a used tissue, and left.
Selina Heinen, a brand representative who worked with one of Wyrmwood’s business partners, described “barrages of flirty text messages” from Downey, who eventually told them, “I think we should have sex.” Heinen says they told Downey no, and that they didn’t want to date within the industry for fear of being judged unfairly by Source: Gizmodo