Video games have changed in a lot of ways over the last ten years or so - in fact, the ability to change is a large change in itself. With the advent of the internet, games now change from week to week and from year to year for as long as the developers see fit to fix, improve, expand, and balance.
The filter should be optional, but in my opinion, the default setting should use the filter, and it would include only reviews from the last 12 months (for games which are being actively updated) or reviews since the last update (in cases where games have finalized over a year ago), with a floor of at least 5 reviews in cases where too many reviews would be left out (more than 5 would be better, but there do not seem to be enough sites on Metacritic to support a larger number at the moment). Take or leave the particulars of that, but you get the idea.
For example, consider League of Legends. Currently, Metacritic rates it at a 78. Not horrible, but frankly, this groundbreaking and addictive game has come a long way since those reviews were written, and the early reviewers couldn't be blamed, exactly, what with them being human and lacking omniscience and whatnot. As a case study, only as of October 2013 did Gamespot get around to re-reviewing League of Legends, bumping its score from a 6-with-potential (or as far as Metascore is concerned, a 6) to a solid 9. Currently, Metascore only uses the score of 6 in its scoring. Players who can only play the March, 2014 version of League of Legends are being presented a weighted average of scores of games spanning from post-beta and continuing on throughout years of meticulous balance, graphical overhauls, expansions, tweaks, and so on.
Another example to consider is Windforge. Plagued by a prolonged crowd-sourced development and a buggy release, this game only has two reviews so far, but if it accumulates many more, it is unlikely to ever recover, regardless of any patches it comes out with in the future. Speaking as someone who really wants to like this inspired-but-reportedly-unplayable game, the solution to me is obvious - don't score the game based on potential, but do have its Metascore to be based on the game people are actually getting.
In the case of Windforge, one could argue that rushing an unfinished game to publication comes with its risks, but it's harder to say this about League of Legends, which was designed with constant iteration as a core feature, a hook which keeps players coming back with an eye out for new champion skins. And in Windforge's case, I agree that legacy reviews are valuable for showing a developer's track record (should I bother pre-ordering from them ever?), but in the end, future shoppers looking to pick up a hypothetical, massively debugged and rebalanced Windforge would be consuming information well past its shelf life.
If there is any sense in the world, then in ten years' time it will have become startling to think that we once lived in a world where reviews of sandcastles were routinely chiseled in stone.
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