My experience is a little limited in this regard, but I’ve received three notable fairly nice looking, heavy and comfortable swag pens in my life as a sysadmin: IBM, Microsoft and Atempo.
So why is it that none of these pens actually work as a pen? The Microsoft and Atempo pens have what appear to be normal, decent quality cartridges and the IBM pen has a super average cartridge but none of them are able to place a solid a line of ink on a clean piece a paper.
The IBM pen also sports a stylus, LED flashlight and laser pointer and all of those functions work properly… so why can’t the pen function also work? Because it’s a swag pen, that’s why.
“The pens never work.” -rthomson