My suspicion is that she is not threatened because she leads a development studio, but because she is a writer. She's not asking for it, but she is making herself a public figure and they are usually targets of such behaviour.
I'd hope that the women I work with aren't regularly getting rape threats from my co-workers...
> I’ve personally never heard of a man in the games industry getting rape threats for having an opinion.
Because men are not women, and women are not men, it goes a little something like this: rape is an act of power (not sexual satisfaction). The threat of rape is the threat of asserting power over someone else. When these lowlifes are offended by a woman, they respond with the animal instinct of threatening to overpower them and rape is the closely available tool. None of them would actually ever have the guts to rape, I'm sure.
When men have contrarian opinions, rape is not threatened, but a whole chain of events occurs, the purpose of which is to remove as much power as possible from that man.
Consider famous causes that you know of where men who are not independently wealthy and have voiced opinions that are controversial to some. What happened to them? They were fired, demoted, jailed, investigated etc. The PyCon case some time back comes to mind.
Consider famous cases of women who did the same. What happened to them? Threats of rape. The same woman involved in the PyCon case, I'll bet, received rape threats. Additionally, she did get fired because she was a public spokesperson for her company.
These threats are about asserting power over dissenting viewpoints in a bid to make yours dominant. You perhaps won't outright hear of a man getting threatened with rape, except maybe in prison or during a competitive game, but you will definitely hear of men being hurt in different ways for having opinions that make people uncomfortable.