I think that's exactly how we get into edition churn honestly. While even casual gamers might pick up the player's guide to a given game, every book beyond those first core books is a losing proposition - your audience just gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Until, of course, you reboot your game and everyone buys the books again.
That model of "edition churn" falls apart when your existing customer base refuses to buy the new books because they have an existing product they are satisfied with and won't buy a new edition just because it is new and different. I think we've seen the first show of that with the 3.5e/PF vs. 4e Schism. I think a 5e coming out soon will risk the same thing happening.
OTOH, if you have a product that you can just keep selling at steady numbers, such as a perscription subcription (in whatever form your audience wants) then you can have a much more stable business platform. Once you have a stable business platform, you don't need new editions.
That whole "D&D should be like Monopoly" thread that died recently seemed to miss that point. For any RPG to have a stable platform, it needs steady sales. Book trade doesn't seem to get that done. Hardly surprising considering the upheaval that the publishing industry in general is going through. So, other options have to be looked at.
The problem is, that as a game, D&D doesn't need steady sales, it needs it as a profitable product. Hence the whole concept of the thread.
You can play for many years on just the 3 core books of virtually any edition. If all I had was the core 3 for 3.5e, I could run games on that for the rest of my life, everything else is optional. . .and realizing that is WotC's nightmare because it kills sales.
I've seen a number of gaming groups that still play or played for many years niche product books that only had one or two books released for them, with no more support ever, or that play what was once a well supported game but hasn't had books released in many years. The need for "support" in the form of new supplements and web information is illusory, it is just that: supplementary.
In fact, I've noticed a pattern over many games, not just D&D, that as more and more products come out the complexity of the game rises, the difficulty of GM'ing rises, and the barrier to entry for a new player rises. If/when a new edition comes along, then there is the tough choice to effectively lose the hundreds (or even thousands) spent on buying books, or move to the new edition along with "everybody else", although you don't need to buy it to keep playing as long as your players are satisfied with the system as-is and want to keep on playing as if nothing changed.
It's this train of thought which lead me to create the thread, the realization that D&D as a game does not need a constant stream of new supplementary books every month, and new editions every few years, to be playable and enjoyable. It only needs those things for business reasons as the product of a publicly traded company that has to be accountable to stockholders for record profits every quarter, not for the quality of the game being playable and fun.
I first realized it circa 2005, when I realized that I was buying all the various D&D 3.x products, but I'd never get close to using them all, I'd buy a new $40 book to read through it for stuff to use in a game, but I'd probably never use more than one or two feats or spells from it. . .and I couldn't afford to keep doing it. As I've watched D&D and the gaming industry as a whole progress in the 6 years since then, I've continued to hold this philosophy the more things I've seen happen in the gaming world.
