Palmer will be dearly missed. Palmer’s legacy extends far beyond Oculus. His inventive spirit helped kickstart the modern VR revolution and helped build an industry. We’re thankful for everything he did for Oculus and VR, and we wish him all the best.

Palmer Luckey, the person most directly associated with the rise of Oculus as a major force in the growing world of virtual reality hardware, has left parent company Facebook , according to a statement provided to Ars Technica by a Facebook representative:

Facebook declined to clarify further details about Luckey’s departure and did not specify whether Luckey would issue any official statement on the matter.

After being a major face of the company since Oculus' first public prototype unveiling in 2012, Luckey's public role with the company has been greatly reduced since September, when he was financially linked to an odd Donald Trump-backing "shitposting" group. Luckey quickly apologized for the impact that revelation had on the rest of Oculus as a company after a vocal backlash among some in the VR community. Luckey did not appear at Oculus' annual Connect conference last September after taking a keynote spot at the previous Connect events.

Luckey did appear briefly at a January trial in which id Software owner Zenimax Media accused Oculus of misappropriating trade secrets. While Oculus was cleared of the worst of those charges, the company was found liable for $300 million for various related charges. Luckey himself was personally found liable for $50 million in damages.

As a founder and major shareholder of the company, Luckey received a significant chunk of the $2 billion in cash and stock Facebook used to purchase Oculus in 2014. "When Facebook first approached us about partnering, I was skeptical," the then 21-year-old Luckey wrote at the time. "As I learned more about the company and its vision and spoke with [CEO Mark Zuckerberg], the partnership not only made sense but became the clear and obvious path to delivering virtual reality to everyone."

Luckey's departure comes just after the first anniversary of the consumer launch of its flagship product, the Rift, which came after years of more limited prototype and developer kit releases. Just before that launch, Luckey apologized for the poor reception to the headset's $600 initial asking price, which he had previously said would be "in the ballpark" of the $350 development kits. "I handled the messaging poorly," Luckey wrote at the time. "[We assumed] we had been clear enough about setting expectations."

A report from the analysts at Superdata estimates Oculus shipped about 240,000 of the $600 Rift headsets in 2016, before a price drop just this month. Samsung's Gear VR, which incorporates technology developed by Oculus, has shipped over 5 million headsets, though many of them were given for free to Samsung phone purchasers.

Sam Machkovech contributed to this report.