Murdock, the way it works is this:

ELSPA grossly overestimates the damages caused and tries to have the guy beheaded or put away for a million years.
The judge says "No way! He just sold some discs with pirated stuff on it! No way I'm putting this guy away for a million years!"
In the end, they're usually put away for the lowest amount of time that can possibly be given based on the damage they have supposedly caused.

Not saying this was the case here, but it's usually how it works, in a nutshell. It is not at all inconceivable that the charge laid on him was that he caused the assorted game publishers half a million dollars of damages. To give a comparison figure, according to the RIAA a person sharing about 10GB worth of MP3s over P2P are causing the record companies a financial loss of about 4 to 5 million dollars.