No since you can also get those ships with in game money and plan is to remove ship buying on release. So there is no paywall.
When the game gets an actual release, there will undoubtedly be a refactoring of pricing to make the ships that people have paid hundreds of dollars for significantly expensive in terms of in-game funds, or to make the required amount of in-game funds non-trivial to acquire. The backlash from some whales who have spent what are (to me) absurd amounts of cash on ships if those ships are then trivially easy to acquire via gameplay would be immense.
The real problem SC is likely to face when/if it ever approaches an actual release is balancing. Firstly in terms of the game economy and secondly in terms of the relative utility and combat strength of ships. If somebody's $300 immersion chariot can be taken down by three goons in entry level Auroras with dedicated ganking min/max builds (and if they can't, that will be another first that Roberts has managed because there are gamers who basically spend their lives working out how to pull stunts like that) the wailing and gnashing of teeth will be immense.
The only potential way that issue is going to be avoided will be that from what I see of the game online at the moment, ships seem increasingly to exist primarily as a way for people to travel to different locations to play an FPS game. As I was one of the people whose interest in this game was prompted by Chris's original pitch of basically an updated Wing Commander with MMO elements, I'm more relieved every day that I ultimately decided not to back it after remembering the development debacle that Freelancer became. I still hope it gets a release (S42 more than SC) and if it looks good at that time, I'll almost certainly buy it but the idea of throwing
any money into it when it's in its current state based on Chris Roberts's promises of what it will become, let alone the significant amounts needed to buy in with something other than the basic ship, still seems extremely risky to me.
The fact is, nobody knows how much of a paywall the released game will have in real terms because no matter what you can theoretically do in the game in terms of earning and buying ships, it's not until the game is out there with a live economy and no more wipes after updates that the actual situation will be known. Any assessment of that made today is ultimately based on what Chris Roberts says will happen and in terms of reliability, that's not what I'd call a sound basis on which to make judgements. If it was, I'd have been playing his updated Wing Commander game for about four years now.
I'll throw in a prediction actually; whenever it gets what most of us would recognise as a conventional release, it will move to either a freemium or subscription model, probably freemium, within two years. That's unless you imagine that they can somehow make enough money from one-off sales of the game to support CIG's international network of studios that will be required to deliver ongoing content, despite the fact that much of the game's target audience will have already bought in by that time. That's the aspect of their business model that I find most baffling to be honest; the fact that we're talking about one of the most costly games in history to develop even to the point it's at today, yet the funding tap is planned to be turned off completely on release day other than one-off purchases of the game. It's a massive elephant twerking in the corner of the room in a day-glo tutu whilst playing cymbals, which many people seem to be able to completely ignore.
But even currently there is no pay wall for the content.
