I decided to ask this after talking to some of my friends. I'm from Serbia (Balkan) and I'm very proud of the fact that I have a legal copy of Xp (I am the only one that have it in my circle of friends) and a legal copy of Game Studio. There is not one single thing made for my project that I made with illegal software and I am very careful on what I download, always checking the readme files. I don't use Max, Maya, Photoshop, Premier, Poser and similar software because I have invested a lot of time in this project and I want to be on the safe-side but...

When I find someone to join my project I'm having really difficult time in explaining why they need to buy and work with legal software. I am very new in all of this, my entire country is very new in all of this, so my question is:

At what stage of game development, or game publishing, legal software becomes relevant?