I don't think you have anything to fear. Here is what Yoshi said about free to play for ARR.

The last thing is that our aim is to make an MMO and a lot of companies do their development for MMOs by getting money from investors. Then the investors want their money back, so if the game doesn’t make enough money or doesn’t have enough users, then what do we do? We’d have to pay our investors back, and free-to-play is an option to get that money back to investors quickly. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is a product that is independent to Square-Enix. All of the money’s coming from us, so we had more time to put it into what we wanted to do. We’re not in a rush to pay anyone back.
http://www.examiner.com/article/squa...t-free-to-play