Hi i don,t know if anyone cares about it or not but, would it not be a better choice to package the dat files in a Indexed Archive.

Like Several Similar games does instead of having around 180k Small and some big files.
It probably does not take much to change the exe of the, game to look for the files in a package instead of them being loose files.

The only advantage i see with having the dat files loose is when a SSD is used, since the access/seek times are almost none with no moveable parts.

The other concern i have is that most of the files are under the default HDD sector size of 4kb (Wasted Space) and by default windows directly stores them in the MFT resulting in the MFT being fragmented faster and that is very very bad...
considering that not everybody is knowledgeable about stuff like this. And we all know that drive access to thousands of tiny files is much slower than access to one big file(excluding SSD). no matter how good your file structure is on the drive