Gear or a game?
Both work at this budget, and the right answer depends on how well you know them.
Buy gear if you don’t know their taste in games. A mouse, a headset or a mat is useful regardless of what they play, and there is no such thing as a duplicate you can’t see — you can usually tell at a glance whether their desk already has one.
Buy a game if you know roughly what they enjoy, or if you want something with a bit more personality than a peripheral. The catch is the one that catches everyone: a PC gamer may own hundreds of games in a library you can’t see. If duplication worries you, a Steam gift card removes the risk entirely — our gaming gift cards buying guide covers which card to buy and where.
How to give a PC game
This part used to be the hard bit and isn’t any more. Since Valve’s July 2026 update you can gift a Steam game without a Steam account of your own, sending it straight to the recipient’s email address through guest checkout. The step-by-step is in our how to gift a game on Steam guide.
The alternative, and the one to choose if you want something to wrap, is buying the game as an online game code. The code arrives in your own inbox, so you can print it, put it in a card, and hand it over on the day. Both of the games on this list work that way, and how to redeem a game code covers what they do with it.
What to skip at this budget
Two things reliably disappoint under $50. Anything internal — graphics cards, memory, storage. It has to match their specific machine, it’s the one category where the wrong choice is useless rather than merely unwanted, and $50 doesn’t buy a meaningful upgrade anyway.
A cheap wireless headset. Wireless is the feature that costs money; under $50 a wired headset will sound noticeably better than a wireless one at the same price. If wireless specifically matters to them, it’s worth going up a tier — our wired vs wireless headset comparison lays out what you actually give up.
