AFP - Mobile social networking ruled on Saturday as the techno-hip at South By South West (SXSW) used location-based services on smartphones to track down everything from panels to parties.

It turned out that the mysterious session was being headed by none other than SimCity and Spore creator Will Wright.

"I am not Phaedrus," Wright said, as he made his way to center stage amid thunderous applause. He said that the reason the panel was under a pseudonym was because he wasn't entirely sure he could attend the conference.

Paul Bettner, who worked at Ensemble Studios for 12 years before it was shut down by Microsoft in 2008, blamed their own internal "crunch culture" on the studio's demise. "The reality is that every single game we shipped took twice as long as we said it was going to take, and cost twice as much to make," Bettner said. "Microsoft is a public company, they answer to their shareholders, and we were simply too expensive."

Part of the problem, Bettner explained, was that a culture grew in Ensemble where "everyone was a workaholic" and "addicted" to repeated successes with the Age of Empires series, leading to high project costs and poor quality of life for employees. And, he argued, it's a problem that's industry-wide: "This is a horrible vicious cycle. We burn out all our best people. We destroy these precious artists, we wreck their families and we sacrifice their youth. So they leave, and they take all their experience with them," he said.