Winster.com

Winster.com is a social game website offering a variety of multi-player casual games. At Winster.com, the more that players work together, the more they win. The collaborative nature of the games encourages positive social interaction, which may lead to companionship and friendship among players.
Winster games differ from traditional casual games in two ways. First, players don’t compete, so there are never winners and losers. Second, the games are played in small groups of up to five players, in contrast to the more common solitary play of casual games sites, where interaction is limited to a chat window and/or ‘leaderboard’ ranking players’ scores. Winster is also distinguished from recent social games in that the players are present and communicating at the same time, as opposed to playing sequentially.
Conceptual Roots
Winster draws its inspiration from the academic field of Evolutionary Psychology. In particular, it is based on the theory that human sharing through small-group collaboration provided a survival advantage by facilitating the efficient allocation of scarce or perishable resources. Some theorists believe that this behavior has evolved into a human instinct which is stronger in females than males.
The first stage of such sharing, which is exhibited by new visitors to the site, is barter transactions that have clear immediate benefits for each participant. As trust develops, this evolves into a tit-for-tat strategy, also known in the literature as sequential altruism. The final stage is the development of long term inter-personal relationships, where each party develops a reputational assessment of the good will of the others in their collaborative group. These in-game friendships easily extend beyond the game to other aspects of the player’s lives.
Formal research on human cooperation has found that pleasurable brain activity result from cooperative or altruistic acts. Some studies have concluded that trust and mutual aid causes (or results from) the release of the hormone Oxytocin.
Winster embodies these theories in the familiar and widely available form of an internet game site.
Business model
Winster adopts a freemium business model, where players can play for free, but can also purchase special privileges such as the elimination of ads or the creation of private ‘rooms’ to play with their friends. Sources of direct revenue include monthly memberships, virtual gifts, and decorative items to dress up an avatar (all players are represented on-screen by a smiley face).
In contrast to many game sites, daily play is limited by the number of spins available, so players wishing additional play time are encouraged to purchase additional play and/or memberships.
The site derives revenue from non-paying players primarily through online advertising, in a variety of formats including banners and video ‘commercial breaks’. Paying members see only limited banner ads.
Winster began as the brainchild of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan and his wife. Upon learning that most casual game players are adult females, and noting that his wife (and her friends) was among them, he asked what she liked and didn’t like about the games she played. She commented that the games were fun, but she didn’t like the competitive and adversarial relationship among the players she encountered.
Kaplan observed that the available casual games were mostly derivative of early arcade and console games, originally targeted to younger male players. As such, they emphasized learning new skills, conquering challenges, earning the right to play at higher levels, elevating social status, and beating the competition. In short, they catered to the psychological needs of adolescent males, as opposed to the primary audience of adult women.
Together they developed the idea for a different type of game site that would facilitate the preferred social patterns of adult women, incorporating some of the research concepts described above.
The site launched in 2004 with one initial game (Chain Gang). In 2006, U.S. Venture Partners led a Series A investment round. In 2010, IDG Ventures San Francisco led a Series B round. As of September 2010, Winster offers ten games, all based on the common formula of cooperation and sharing.
Since its inception in 2004, many social networking features have been added to the site, including friends lists, group messages (called ‘Conversations’), and trophies for passing certain milestones.
The site is ‘hosted’ by an apocryphal character, Winnie Winster, loosely based on Kaplan’s wife. Winnie welcomes all players, passes out extra play time, provides news and updates about the site, and generally brands the site in the style of a talk show or TV shopping channel host. Winnie also has her own Fan Page on Facebook.

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