At a regional heat for a major fighting game tournament – “Defend the North” in New York City – the Xbox One’s anti-piracy measures somehow kicked in at the worst possible moment, reports VG24/7.

Mid-match, the Xbox One kicks the players back out to the dashboard, and before letting the game continue, shows this message:

“Do you own this game or app? If you have a game disc, insert it now, If there’s no disc, make sure you’re signed into Xbox Live. If you don’t have rights for playing it, you’ll need to buy it at the Xbox Store.”

It bears mentioning that Killer Instinct is a free-to-play, download-only game, requiring only an Xbox Live Gold subscription.

It all happened live on Twitch.tv, the popular streaming service that many games use to broadcast their gameplay. Team Spooky, the streaming community that originally provided the event coverage, uploaded the following video which shows it all happen via Youtube (skip to the 6 minutes, 30 seconds mark):

Fighting game commentator Arturo Sanchez is left flabbergasted, and so are many others. In the video description Sanchez describes his hope for the DRM issue not occurring in a more serious, major tournament setting such as Defend the North or EVO2k14. The macth was restarted as pausing the game results in an immediate forfeiting of that particular in-game round for the pausing player.

This is the sort of occurrence that many gamers were worried about during the run up to the Xbox One’s launch during its tumultuous PR campaign last year – but it seems that this is just an isolated incident for the time being, What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.