Lol, "choice" by limiting which platforms it releases on. Okay.
How come? 12% isn't a lot of money, especially if the sales in EGS are still low. And they still need to address many issues like... no shopping cart. And if Fortnite slows down, their main source of income will become the Unreal Engine royalties again.
Epic can only afford this because of Fortnite. Without it, no exclusives. Else, they would have tried to do it before Fortnite Battle Royale was released.
Basically this. If the Fortnite money starts to dry up expect fewer moneyhats and that 12% revenue share to steadily climb. But while they have the cash Epic wants to build a new market for its business (and if they're successful, one that's probably going to provide a more steady long term income than a F2P multiplayer game), and thinks it can prove a point to developers: their games will sell without Steam, so why not release exclusively on EGS (without a moneyhat) with a more favourable share of the profit?
Because that's the endgame. The moneyhats are only there so they can brag that games sell well on EGS. Once they can prove it, the moneyhats will stop. In a year or so I'll be interested to see how many publishers are willing to go EGS exclusive without the moneyhats, and how many moneyhats EGS are actually handing out.
Epic never want to actually go toe-to-toe with Steam on the same games because Steam (or any other decent PC games store/client for that fact, such as GOG or Origin or heck, even Uplay) will always trounce them, since EGS has no unique selling point for the customer and Epic doesn't want to invest any cash in creating one.