An alternate title might be, “All’s well that ends well,” as it seems as though the (sunk) Flagship games mass exodus has finally seen a silver lining. Runic Games, which was founded by ex-Flagship devs, announced this week that their premier title: Torchlight has officially sold over 500,000 copies worldwide, both digitally and on the PC. This announcement comes immediately following their announcement of Torchlight available to Mac players via Steam.

Torchlight is a single-player, Diablo-esque RPG , (current devs are former Diablo, Diablo II, and Hellgate: London team members) but Runic Games has been touting the fact that they’re about two years out from a Torchlight MMO. To this end, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Perfect World, a Chinese developer and publisher of several MMO’s revealed in their Q1 2010 financial results that they’ve acquired a majority stake in Runic Games for approximately $8.4 million. Not a bad exit/payout for a firm that was born from the ashes of an epic debacle.

Again, this acquisition shouldn’t come as a surprise, as since April 2009, Perfect World inked a deal with Runic Games to be the exclusive worldwide publisher of Torchlight. In other words, Perfect World already had a vested interest in the success of Torchlight, and now with the magic 500K copies sold benchmark being achieved, presumably, Perfect World decided to go “all in” at the table.

According to Perfect Word, the Runic Games buy in is centered around strengthening R&D capabilities. Long term, the goal is to fuse Runic Games’ experience in developing sophisticated gameplay and graphics engines with their own expertise in publishing and administering free-to-play MMO’s.