Intel’s netbook app store finally gets a blockbuster with Angry Birds

After charming mobile gamers with its crazy concept and sharp physics engine, Angry Birds is flying over to Intel’s AppUp app store, which offers software downloads for devices running on Intel’s chips.

The AppUp store launched in at the Intel Developer’s Forum in September. It took off pretty quickly and had around 450,000 users and 23,000 program members when it launched. But it has, for the most part, sat in the shadows of Apple’s App Store for iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads, and the Android Market for devices running Google’s mobile operating system.

Now it has one of the most popular mobile games of 2010. In Angry Birds, players take control of a batch of birds and fling them with a slingshot across the screen to blow up pigs and their fortresses. The gameplay is pretty simple and quite addictive. So much so that the game broke all of the records on the Apple App Store in its first 10 months after release, selling more than 6.5 million copies.

Angry Birds made its way over to other smartphones and the iPad, where it also saw a rather absurd amount of success — forcing independent app marketplace GetJar to shut down temporarily due to demand for the Android version. More than 77 percent of Angry Birds players update the game as new levels become available. New updates with new levels come out every three or four weeks.

The game is supposed to run on any computer using an Intel chip — including netbooks and typical notebook computers. It expands to support the resolution of each device, and can be streamed out to an HD television at 1080p, according to Intel.

Either way, this should give Intel’s app store a little bit of a boost. The AppUp store has a good number of developers, and Intel also offers some incentives for developing top-of-the-line apps. But porting insanely popular applications over to a new app distribution channel isn’t necessarily the secret to success. Winning the App Store game isn’t necessarily a numbers game — it’s about having access to good applications and some great exclusives.