When will the next edition of Call of Cthulhu arrive?

Question

When will the next CoC edition be released? If there hasn't been an official announcement, I'll take hints, rumours, experience with previous editions and calculations.

Answer 1

Well, that's a good question. Back in the day, Chaosium cranked out a new version every 3 years whether it needed to or not - and usually it didn't; the actual changes from version 1 to version 6 are only noticable to experts. One answer is "who cares, get the current version, because the next one won't be much different."

Now, the versions started getting less frequent especially as Chaosium had financial troubles, and it seems like a lot of the activity now are other games licensing the IP (Trail, Shadows, Realms of Cthulhu). It's been 6 years since a new rev so they'd seem due. It does seem like they'd want to put out a Seventh Edition at some point if only to keep it in print and bring in a little money - but they ran out of 6th Edition in May and decided to just reprint it, so probably not for a while. In general things are going very slowly for them (some months there's not even a R'lyeh Report; when there is it's largely unchanged from previous months).

Answer 2

I've just found this Q&A, and seen that it's rather outdated, so, FYI:

Dustin [Wright, of Chaosium] said Chaosium expects Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition to be published in 2013, but there’s no firm date yet.

Source and (quite a lot of) further details: Inside Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition, July 24, 2012