My theory is that current 12% is enough to cover expenses without profit. If we take his own words he said that 8% is enough for their expenses. We know that 5% is needed to cover all payment fees by his words 1% is for expanding platform, let's say that additional 1% is needed for other employees dedicated to store, if we add at least 2% for server and bandwidth costs we are already above their 8% and getting dangerously close to that magic 12%.
Nah, I think their initial "thoughts" on the shop where a 5% "profit" cut that would make it so that even if games were bought from the "influencers" during the first two years, they would not lose money.
They basically said their costs were 5-8% on normal game sales.
From normal sales, we know that card costs are 2-5%, which aligns with the uncertity values they have. For payment methods that cost more, they probably take only 5% and move the rest to the consumer.
Add their "1%" on improvement on the shop and general maintenance (AKA all the work done by humans). For now, it seems they have a skeleton crew (at least on the shop side, with maybe more people on the legal side to account for legal issues for adding new currencies) as Galy seems to have taken way too many tasks and the development of new features being... Slow to say the least (their offline mode is basically a work around that tells the launcher you are online manually instead of a proper development).
And 2% on the server side. (No idea about the costs of this, but I assume they thought they could leverage Fortnite load to get cheaper prices).
Now, this is my guess on their napkin calculations, and even at a 5% profit range, they might as well step back and think...
Is it really better for me to do this or can I make the same out of the Unreal Engine games that launch on Steam.