The days of Oculus VR being an independent entity are over - the virtual reality company has been made a subsidiary of Facebook Technologies LLC, reports UploadVR.

For those of you not into the whole VR thing, Oculus VR is arguably the company that made modern virtual reality a thing. There have always been companies trying to make it work, but a Kickstarter by Oculus VR was what really got things rolling along. It achieved nearly ten times its campaign goal.

Following the success of its campaign, the company found themselves struggling to actually get their headsets out there. Later parts shortages also resulted in irate customers. Even so, the company stayed well afloat and seemed to be doing quite well. Competition from HTC's Vive and open-source initiatives like OSVR meant that there would be quite the healthy market for competition - indeed, all three of these platforms are supported on Steam in one way or another.

However, HTC and OSVR were going up against a much stronger Oculus VR - the company had been acquired by Facebook for over $2 billion. The company had been largely independent, but it has now been fully absorbed and is a subsidiary of Facebook Technologies.

Strangely, Facebook had previously been relatively hands-off with its acquisitions. To this day, Instagram and Whatsapp are more or less allowed to operate just as they had before Mark Zuckerberg handed them one of those comically oversized sacks of cash with a dollar sign on it. Why, then, is Oculus VR being treated differently?

While no specifics were mentioned, the speculation is that some people higher up at Facebook likely consider virtual reality technology important to the future of Facebook. As such, it would make sense that they would want a greater degree of control over the hardware and software developer.

Although this change was made official in September, we still haven't yet seen any major changes in the day-to-day usage for your average Oculus Rift user. There's no need to have a Facebook account to use your headset or anything like that - for now.

What do you think of Facebook Technologies taking on Oculus VR as a subsidiary? Do you think this is a good sign or a bad sign for the future of the company? Let us know in the comments below!