Doesn't quite work like that. Deals tend to vary a lot, but publishers generally pay directly for the entire development budget.
They then spend as much (or a lot more) on marketing than they do on development.
For a $60US title, a publisher could make $20-$25US / unit. Say that total costs (marketing + dev) come to $30m (only for BIG titles - not average titles).
(this is more for platform holders, as it only costs them a couple of bucks to produce/box titles - versus the $5-$10 /unit they charge for 3rd-party developers).
That comes to about 1m units to break even (for the publisher). This would be over lifetime - years. There might be other revenue streams as well (licensing, digital downloads, advertising, etc...).
Its completely reasonable for a publisher to spend $10m-$15m on a "medium" sized title (marketing + dev costs) resulting in roughly 500k units to break even.
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