Yeah this isn't really aimed at folks who already like Horizon, it's primarily to introduce the IP to people who haven't played it before in order to grow its reach.

Hence why it's on Switch; Sony must have looked at that 140 million plus install base and thought, "how can we bring some of that audience over to our franchises?"

The first game has over 20 million in sales. The franchise itself is over 30 million.

The first  game is packed In heavy and always on sale just for comparison gow ragnarok in 1 year 15 million in sales, spider man 2 is at 11 million sold through after 8 months. Horizon forbidden west after 1 year is 8.4 million. It's big but it's nearly the biggest Playstation franchise  the revenue for horizon is very telling and they are desperate to push the character.

I think Horizon has done very well for a relatively young IP, not many such games reach 8 figures on their first try.
I am curious how much this LEGO edition will sell; the most recent LEGO Star Wars sold over 5 million in two months.

This sounds pretty divorced from reality no lies.

You should know that Sony of all companies is not going to waste their time and effort pushing a character if the associated game isn't seeing actual movement with the demographic they're targeting. 

This weird narrative to consistently downplay the Horizon IP and Aloy is baffling to say the least.

I'm not sure it reaches those numbers, considering the popularity of Star Wars. But, Aloy has made an appearances in both Fortnite and Genshin (and I think there was a MHW crossover event too), so there's def an audience who will know who she is. 

I do think the game does need to review well though, which makes me wonder what kind of replayability it has. On the surface it looks like a potential dungeon crawler, but is presented in a more narrative focused campaign. 

The franchise is doing good no doubt but the game was giving away for free for a very long time just look at the revenue for zero dawn despite selling 24 million ghost of tushami has more revenue.

Yeah I don't expect it to be as popular as the Star Wars entries as its a smaller IP, but it still does show there's a sizeable audience for the LEGO series. 

Regarding reviews, I'm not sure if the audience for these games really bothers to read/watch game reviews, but in a broader sense word of mouth will definitely be a significant factor. This is developed by Guerrilla themselves so I expect it should be pretty well made.

First look at gameplay of the Switch version, from the recent Direct:

Seems to hold up really well