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“I don’t believe that Netflix thinks in a way about ‘AAA’ or ‘AA,’ [industry lingo for premium, big-budget games] or any of that sort of traditional nomenclature about what defines a game,” said Gareth Sutcliffe, the head analyst covering the games industry for the market research service Enders Analysis. “I think they’re much more lateral in terms of defining the game experience, particularly when they are looking at a technology-led distribution model, around streaming, around multiple devices, tied in with the SVOD [subscription video on demand] offering.”

“It’ll be the largest television show globally for weeks. When that launches, it will be absolutely massive, and they’re shipping a game simultaneously,” Sutcliffe said. “I think that’s really aggressive, and I think that that’s really incredibly clever.”

As Karen Egan at Enders Analysis argued: “It is heartening to see that the CMA has taken the time to get to grips with the complexities of the industry”, so allowing a probable decision “counter to the knee-jerk assumption that four to three mergers are anti-competition”. True, network integration is hard, not least when cost cuts hurt staff morale. And the regulators would need to ensure Voda/Three lived up to its promises, with penalties for poor delivery. But the pair have a case that their merger is “pro-growth, pro-customer and pro-competitive”. The CMA is right not to hang up on this four-to-three deal.

Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis, also said the CMA appears to have all but approved the proposed Vodafone-Three merger.

Writing on LinkedIn, Egan said the CMA believes that the merger could be pro-competition “so long as it can be assured that the network promises of the merging parties will be fulfilled, and that the short-term customer protections that it talked about in its provisional findings (social tariffs, contract terms rolling over, wholesale reference offer) can be put in place.”

Egan pointed out that this is a step forward from the CMA’s provisional findings, “where it put forward such remedies, but also discussed structural remedies (although largely discounted them), and listed blocking the merger altogether as a remedy (which it did not discount).”

Three, which tends to have a younger customer base, generally has some of the cheapest monthly contracts among the four biggest mobile network operators, according to figures from Enders Analysis.

However, telecoms analysts are not convinced that the tie-up will necessarily lead to higher prices. “There doesn’t seem to be a correlation between fewer mobile players and consumer pricing,” said Karen Egan, head of telecoms at Enders Analysis.

“The UK will be better off if, as seems, this merger is finally approved,” Karen Egan, at Enders Research,said in a LinkedIn post. Blocking the deal “would not have yielded a positive outcome for the economy or consumers.”