The difficulty here is not that your partner plays games. It is that you are buying for a hobby you cannot assess from the outside, in a market that produces an enormous amount of merchandise aimed at the idea of a gamer rather than at any actual person.
That is the same problem as buying for any specialist interest, with one additional wrinkle: the specialist merchandise is unusually plentiful and unusually generic.
Why the obvious gifts miss
Buying a specific game. High risk unless you have been given a title. Their taste is specific, they probably already own it, and the ones they want are on a list you cannot see. A gift card is unromantic and correct.
Themed merchandise. A controller-shaped anything with hearts on it, a mug about levelling up, a t-shirt with a joke about respawning. These are gifts to a demographic, and receiving one tells you that somebody bought for the category rather than for you.
Anything that reads as a comment on the hobby. A gift that gently suggests they might do something else is not a Valentine's present.
What tends to work
Improve what they use for hours. This is the reliable one. If somebody spends three hours a day at a desk with a headset on, then the headset, the chair and the screen are the highest-leverage objects in their life, and most people are using whatever came free or cheapest.
Audio first, seating second. Both are noticeable every single day and neither is something people upgrade for themselves readily.
Something about the two of you that uses the medium. Which is a different thing from a gaming gift, and it is the strongest category here.
Time to play, given deliberately. An evening where the household is handled and they are not needed. Slightly odd as a romantic gesture and genuinely valued, particularly for anyone with children.
Play with them, if you mean it. Sitting down and being bad at something with somebody who is good at it is a real gesture. The caveat matters: doing it once as a Valentine's stunt and never again is transparent, and lands worse than not trying.
Why a commissioned game suits this case
There is a specific reason this works better for a partner who plays than for one who does not.
For somebody who does not play, being in a game is a novelty, and part of the reaction is to the format itself. For somebody who plays constantly, the format is completely ordinary, so none of the attention goes to it. All of it goes to the content, which is the two of you.
That makes it closer to giving a musician a piece of music than to giving them a novelty. The frame disappears and the subject is all that is left.
The brief that works is your actual relationship rather than gaming as a theme. Where you met, as a level. The holiday. The flat. The running argument. Both of you painted from photographs as the characters. The in-jokes as the level names.
What does not work is a game about them being a gamer, which is the same mistake as the themed merchandise wearing a more expensive coat.
The tiers are £99 for a single level and £349 for a multi-level build. For two people and one story, the smaller tier is usually enough, and short is better anyway because it will be played in one sitting on the evening, which is the argument in how long a custom game should take to finish.
One practical note: use ordinary photographs rather than posed ones. The badly lit picture from the kitchen produces two recognisable people; a formal portrait produces two strangers in nice clothes.
If you both play
A different and easier problem, with a specific answer.
Most couples who both play end up playing separately, in the same room, at different things. The valuable gift is something that produces a shared activity rather than two parallel ones.
A co-operative game neither of you has played, started together on the night, is a genuinely good present and costs very little. So is anything with a competitive edge if that is the dynamic you both enjoy.
The same logic scales up to a group, which is the subject of a fighting game starring your friend group.
What to avoid
Anything with a pun about gaming and love on it.
A game you chose without being told which.
Anything that arrives with a suggestion that they play less.
Merchandise for a game they used to like. Interests move, and buying for the version of them from three years ago is the same error as buying for a teenager's old obsession, described in 16th birthday gift ideas.
What this means
Upgrade the thing they use daily, if you want a safe and genuinely good object.
Or make it about the two of you and use the medium rather than referencing it.
And if you play with them, keep playing with them. That is the actual gift.
