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Dense subgraph discovery is an important problem in graph mining and network analysis with several applications. Two canonical polynomial-time solvable problems here are to find a maxcore (subgraph of maximum min degree) and to find a densest subgraph (subgraph of maximum average degree). Both of these problems can be solved in polynomial time. Veldt, Benson, and Kleinberg [Veldt et al., 2021] introduced the generalized p-mean densest subgraph problem which captures the maxcore problem when p = -∞ and the densest subgraph problem when p = 1. They observed that for p ≥ 1, the objective function is supermodular and hence the problem can be solved in polynomial time. In this work, we focus on the p-mean densest subgraph problem for p ∈ (-∞, 1). We prove that for every p ∈ (-∞,1), the problem is NP-hard, thus resolving an open question from [Veldt et al., 2021]. We also show that for every p ∈ (0,1), the weighted version of the problem is APX-hard. On the algorithmic front, we describe two simple 1/2-approximation algorithms for every p ∈ (-∞, 1). We complement the approximation algorithms by exhibiting non-trivial instances on which the algorithms simultaneously achieve an approximation factor of at most 1/2.