pay2win? i thought this was going to have singleplayer.
Backers are rewarded with barebones ship hulls, depending upon how much they pledge, and players will be allowed to purchase a limited quantity of game currency from a cash shop once the game goes live (this is in lieu of a monthly subscription fee). These factors only affect the MMO-like portion of the game, not the single-player campaign or user-hosted multiplayer.
A certain type of person will insist that any system whereby a player can purchase benefits for himself is pay2win. I played EVE for years, a game in which anyone with real-life cash can purchase subscription time and trade it for a functionally unlimited amount of in-game currency (and by extension, any ship hull or module in the game), as well as bid on "used" pilots at auction, some of whom have years' worth of skill points accumulated (extremely high-level characters, essentially). This isn't considered pay2win in EVE because having piles of game currency, lots of fancy ships, and a pilot with lots of skill points is in itself completely meaningless. What matters is a player's knowledge of the game, his skill at playing the game, and his network of contacts, friends, and corpmates. These cannot be purchased.
What's more, an intelligent EVE player will pay $0 (not even paying for a subscription, others do that for him) and work his way up to owning tens of thousands of real-life $ worth of in-game assets, more than any but millionaires in real life could afford to buy outright. In fact, EVE players love newfags who sink thousands of dollars into buying shit for themselves. We call then loot piñatas.
There do exist actual pay2win games, wherein a cash shop sells weapons that are stronger than any available normally in the game (or else it takes forever to obtain them normally) and other benefits for pay that offer distinct advantages over other players—advantages that are difficult or impossible to replicate without shelling out cash, and usually quite a bit of it. That's not even remotely the case with Star Citizen.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: I expect skill at piloting one's ship and the strength of a player's guild/network of contacts/et cetera to be much more important than a couple of free ship hulls and raw currency in Star Citizen. If not, the game won't be worth playing anyway (certainly not the MMO portion), and so the pay2win whining is moot one way or the other.