Longtime Mac games maker Pangea is ditching the Mac platform, in favor of the iPhone after bringing in $1.5 million in six months from its most successful App Store game Enigmo. In an interview with the Guardian.co.uk’s games blog, Pangea owner and founder Brian Greenstone calls the money they made off of games for the Mac “lunch money” compared to what it’s brought it from the iPhone. Enigmo, a puzzle game, that was also its most successful on the Mac, was downloaded some 810,000 times between July 2008 and January 2009, which was priced at $2.99.

Read more on Pangea’s success after the jump.

But it’s clear that Pangea’s success was dependent on a lot of factors, that other App Store developers may not be able to control. For a start, he concedes that Pangea, as a long standing maker of Mac games, “got a lot of love from Apple,” including being highlighted in the App Store. Or as he said, “It is just a matter of having the right thing at the right time, with Apple’s help.” Greenstone also advised that developers shouldn’t spend a lot of money on creating their app, since there was “a lot of randomness” as to what succeeds and what doesn’t. Greenstone said, “Horrible apps can still make a lot of money.”

It seems that the key to success these days is getting into the App Store’s Top 100, which means that an app has to sell 1200 – 1500 copies a day. Once an app cracks the Top 100, however, “it’s self-perpetuating,” which means as moves up the list, it sells even more.

Still, one thing did help for Pangea. Enigmo and its other hit game Cro-Mag Rally, a driving game made full use of the iPhone’s accelerometer, and didn’t need a lot of buttons to work, Engimo, for example, made a lot of use of drag and drop using the touch interface, while Cro-Mag Rally turned the iPhone into a steering wheel.

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