Me and a partner designed an insert that fit into that injection molded part and it had games. You could even connect via RS232 if you had the right board and it would print out DEFCON in ASCII then it had whole menu of games.
We sold this add on for $20 at cost to recoup our costs. Sold about 100+ of these add ons.
DEFCON definitely bit off more than they could chew.
We designed our add on around a cheap STM32 series chip and wrote the code ourselves in C. It didn’t have an emulator like this as this is like an entire gaming platform that DEFCON created. But ours was more like DOS level game add on that took us a couple months to make and have produced. We made the stickers ourselves and cut acrylic ourselves.
If you're saying not to have a cool gizmo at all, I think that's too harsh of a lesson.
As for the cost of the badge, sourcing even sub-$1 badge is still a project. And especially when your target audience is somewhat skilled at counterfeiting such things.
Or do what every other event does, and don't make your badges so complicated they need a project manager
Every other event has badges that look like they cost substantially less than $1. I'm not saying they have to go that cheap - but when you're hiring a project manager to coordinate the multiple teams, schedule challenges, and providers biting off more than they can chew? Maybe scale things back a bit.