"We don’t even have an engine" There is a horrible morass of politics in this area, to do with short term goals vs long term investment. As a game approaches

"We don’t even have an engine" There is a horrible morass of politics in this area, to do with short term goals vs long term investment. As a game approaches its release date, the codebase accrues technical debt in the form of title-specific hacks and optimizations, but also features and fixes that may be useful for other titles sharing the codebase. The former makes the latter difficult to propagate. The pressure of internal milestones throughout a game project precludes the team devoting much time to significantly improving any shared codebase during any given title's development, but it also cannot happen any other way since that would involve "people not working on a game". In this situation, a decision to mostly or entirely eschew code sharing begins to appear quite reasonable.