Gifts for gamers, checked against ninety damn days of pricing

Buying for a gamer is a compatibility minefield and a price minefield, and only one of those is our damn department. We cannot tell you whether the headset works with their console. We can tell you whether $89 is a good price for it, which is the damn question they will ask you first anyway.

The good news is that this is the honest end of the catalogue. Electronics have long, dense price histories and models that visibly age, so a discount here is genuine more often than in almost any other department.

How peripheral pricing actually moves

Peripherals follow a hardware release cycle rather than a gift calendar. Prices step down when a successor launches and stay down, which means a large discount on a two-year-old model is not an opportunity, it is just the new damn price. Our scorer treats a sustained lower price as the price, so those score low here — which is the correct and unpopular answer.

The genuinely good buys are short, sharp falls on current models, and they do not last. A high score on this page is more perishable than a high score on the housewarming page.