No. Call of Cthulu has had new editions and refreshes, but for 40 years has remained completely compatible. The D&D approach to Editions was only ever a shady money making scheme from TSR thst WotC early on thought sounded great. But it turns out to be more damaging to profits than helpful. I heard Mearls ipine that if Moldvsy Basic had ascending AC and Race and Class in one box for both Basic and Expert....that TSR could have basically sold it as is forever.
So, now that WotC has learned their lesson, I doubt we shall ever see a "New Edition" with capital N and capital E again. Periodic cleanups and art refreshes, changing things here and there to fit the zeitgisst...but no rules changeover.
Whilst I understand this sentiment, it does have the very unfortunate and large downside of freezing bad systems in amber.
5E is not flawless. Indeed, it has significant flaws. As does CoC, I should note. That's part of the reason why I don't really like to play CoC beyond one-shots and short campaigns anymore. It's not a game I'd play routinely, because it's kind of old and broken, even with the various updates it's had. But because it works well for one-shorts and short campaigns, it keeps selling. That's not how D&D works, in any edition.
And the issue I see is that there are changes 5E needs in order to be genuinely a great D&D game, rather than I think merely one decent game among many (only raised above that by amount and quality of support), gradually increasingly eclipsed by better designs, which couldn't be done whilst maintaining full backwards compatibility.
Mearls is half-right in his claim. They could probably have had small sales of an improved BECMI/RC D&D indefinitely, but the 1990s would have made it just one of the crowd and it would never have re-emerged significantly from the crowd. Without 3E (and to some extent PF and 4E), there would be no massive 5E. There would have been no big cultural resurgence of D&D if D&D was just incrementally improved BECMI - there would just have been some cash-in sales spike around Stranger Things. Because fundamentally a lot of BECMI's systems and approaches aren't great. Instead we'd probably have seen a couple of other RPGs go much, much bigger than they are, but not reach the peaks that 5E has. What RPGs those would be, I have no idea, but I'm confident in saying they wouldn't be slightly upgraded BECMI. There's no way Critical Role, for example, would have picked "upgraded BECMI". Especially as without D&D as a "big dog", there'd have been more competition and advancement in the fantasy RPG space.
Also, the idea that WotC have "learned their lesson" is, frankly, obviously untrue in 2023. It was entirely plausible in say, 2020. But now? No. We know, the 3D VTT and from various comments and the OGL 2.0 debacle, that WotC is essentially trying to do re-enact the plan it had with 4E. It could not be more clear that WotC have
not learned lessons. That includes re: editions.
If WotC does freeze D&D in amber, assuming that all those systems are perfect (and again, no major systems can be changed whilst retaining 100% backwards compatibility), what's going to happen is, D&D will gradually decline in popularity, as fewer streamers/YouTubers/etc. use it - they, inarguably, have hugely driven 5E's success. There won't be another Stranger Things (and similar) to given the concept of D&D generally a big boost. That '80s nostalgia era is over, we're into '90s and even '00s nostalgia now (you'll notice that the few new things set in the 1980s are much nastier about the decade and less wistful, now).
At some point during that popularity decline, some bright spark at WotC will convince the appropriate decision-makers that they could reinvigorate D&D, and get it talked about again, by doing a new edition. Time is a flat circle.
And I think Call of Cthulu is a good case study that thisnis feasible: after 40 years, it is still very popular, seemingly the most popular non-d20 derived game on the market from what I have seen. And given the prominence of H. P. Lovecraft int he DNA of the default setting...careful updating has been extremely necessary.
And if D&D had operated like CoC, it would, if anything, be less popular than CoC. CoC succeeds in part because it's different from other RPGs, and works very well for one-shots and short campaigns (the lengthy campaigns like Orient Express don't play as well as they could, and are thus rarely finished). D&D that didn't make major changes would would have vanished among many other RPGs in the 1990s, and whilst it might have sold better than most, it'd be one of the crowd, sales-wise, and that would remain. I mean, if you're happy to see D&D as just a moderately popular RPG among many, that's not particularly easier to find players for, or the like, sure, that's a reasonable approach.
Frankly, the RPG space would probably be healthier if D&D had taken that approach. The d20 explosion did hideous damage to the RPG space, which took more than a decade to even begin to recover from, and didn't really bring in that many new players. But at the same time, without 3E's approach and the d20 explosion, D&D would have just have got less and less popular. Hell, you wouldn't even have had 2E, because you'd just have had this revised-revised-revised BECMI, which would have been looking grottier and grottier. Without the OGL, which you also probably would not have, there'd be no OSR movement either, because people would be too scared of whoever owned D&D. Without d20 to screw everything up, the the big improvements in mechanical design in the 2000s would likely have come in faster, too, for various games.
EDIT - To clarify - I'm not suggesting D&D-style massive edition changes are the right approach for every RPG, or even most, but I am very much suggesting D&D would be absolutely not be "top dog" by a bazillion miles if it wasn't for such changes, and probably wouldn't be "top dog" at all. It also requires one to wilfully blind oneself to the 2E-3E and 4E-5E transitions, both of which significantly boosted D&D's success.
