One of the biggest battles this holiday season is clearly Rock Band vs. Guitar Hero III. On the one hand, EA and MTV have the original creators of Guitar Hero, Harmonix; and they've got great access to the music industry through MTV. On the other hand, Activision and RedOctane have built up a tremendous brand in Guitar Hero and by all indications the third installment is going to rock.

But what do EA and Activison think about this battle of the bands? During E3, GameDaily BIZ interviewed Frank Gibeau, President of the EA Games label, and Will Kassoy, Activision's senior vice president of global brand management, to get their respective takes on who's going to rock harder this holiday.

Naturally, EA isn't going to back out of a fight. In fact, Gibeau said, "I like our, Harmonix and MTV's chances and we're going to take it to them. This is the type of situation that we relish."

He continued, making a comparison to EA Sports: "In EA Sports [for example], when you go up against competition, it just brings the best out in an organization, so when we go Guitar Hero versus Rock Band, we like our chances in terms of the people that we're working with, Harmonix and MTV. These are world class organizations, and then you combine that with the fact that we think we have very unique product positioning in that it's a rock band. You've got singers, guitars and drums. So when you think about that rock and roll fantasy, some guys fantasize about being drummers, some girls fantasize about being the singer, and now you can have it all; and from a party standpoint, the fact that you can have a band playing in dorm rooms, garages or families playing together, that's where we like our chances... we'll compete, obviously, on who's got the better tracks and who's got the better music and who's first to market and who had the brand and who actually built the thing. That'll all come out in this Fall, and the market will help decide."

For Activision, however, Kassoy believes their genre-defining title has the brand and the mass market recognition to best Rock Band. If anything, Kassoy sees EA as the challenger, not the other way around.

"If you take a step back and look at what the game has done, it's not unlike what GTA did for free-roaming games, or Mario for platformers, or Tony Hawk for skateboarding. It's created a genre in itself, and there's a lot of power with the mass market consumers and enthusiasts that a brand has in their mind, and that Guitar Hero has established," he said.

"In a way it's really up to EA to change that with Rock Band," Kassoy continued. "I think some of the early signs we've seen might make [Rock Band] a little more complex than some of the things that make Guitar Hero so great, which is its accessibility and ease of play for everyone. It's got something for enthusiast gamers in terms of its complexity, but it's really built on 'easy-to-use, difficult to master.' And that ease of use is so, so important for mainstream audiences. We've done that successfully so far and we think Guitar Hero III builds on that even more with adding online, adding co-op, adding boss battles and things that make this franchise so much fun. In a way, I feel like it's [EA's] challenge to come in and make some inroads against this franchise that's become such a pop culture phenomenon. If you go beyond the game industry to just really mass market consumers, people haven't heard about Rock Band yet and the fact that it's only on next-generation platforms is going to be a little bit limiting. I mean, the origins of this franchise are on the PS2, and this year we're finally taking it across all platforms."

Kassoy admits that Harmonix has been tremendous, but he's confident with Neversoft handling Guitar Hero III. "The products from Harmonix have been fantastic, and our focus with Neversoft has been, 'How do we take it to the next level?' And the reactions we've received to date have been, 'They've done it.' They've maintained the hardware/software synergy of the brand that makes it so successful and they're adding new innovations this year that will hopefully advance the franchise even further," he said.

The complete EA interview with Frank Gibeau (which was just posted) delves into the strategy behind EA's recent reorganization into four labels, their positioning on Wii, and much more. You can also expect the complete Activision interview with Will Kassoy in the very near future. Stay tuned!